


Paradoxes of Joy and Suffering

by ungefug



Category: Historical RPF, Original Work, World War II - Fandom
Genre: Blood and Injury, Camaraderie, Cannibalism, Death, Force-Feeding, Gore, Holocaust, M/M, Nazi Germany, Nazis, Nazisploitation, Original Character(s), Pedophilia, PoW, Prisoner of War, Rape, Sappy, Sexual Violence, Soldiers, Supernatural Elements, Torture, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:20:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 57
Words: 32,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26450296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungefug/pseuds/ungefug
Summary: A collection of ficlets and short stories revolving around World War II.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	1. Wolfsbande

**Author's Note:**

> These texts were written over a couple years and vary from dark and serious to exploitative and seedy.
> 
> I chose to go with the M/M label as the content is largely homoerotic, but occasionally it might be straight or lesbian too. Or of course, not of a sexual nature at all.

In his dreams Friedrich still marched to the tunes of his youth, wearing that brown uniform with the freshly shined boots. Curled up in his bed he could feel the rucksack heavy on his sweat drenched back and the grass soft under the hobnails of his soles. His ears were filled with the beat of a hundred boots hitting the ground in perfect unison. Hours passed within seconds and days within minutes. His feet started to bleed, his lungs to burn and then his entire body ached and his brain screamed to stop, stop, stop but he could not for the beat like the dance of the dead pulled his exhausted body forward until he would inevitably stumble and fall to the ground. As he lay there that maniacal tune that had pushed him on still pounded in his ears and through the ground and throughout all of his body. And then he could feel the weight of his comrades on him. A single beast of a dozen limbs and mouths. The moistness of their breaths pained him but the touch of so many hands is never gentle, only tugging and tearing and scratching. They broke into him, ripped him open. They ate his guts, his lungs, his heart. They peeled off his face and then cracked his skull and fought over his brain like wolves. They chewed on his bones, swallowed the tiny bits of it and before his blood could soak the soil they greedily lapped it up. Only when the last remains of him were consumed was he able to open his eyes and come to the crushing realisation that he was still there, his body intact, staring at a ceiling.


	2. Pervitin Boys

The pervitin boys are good to screw up the ass. They don’t eat much, you see, so no nasty surprises. Their bodies are slight, their faces gaunt. Gaping white eyes and tight little holes, pink pussies, virgin guts. Pristine boys in dirty uniforms. And they won’t raise a complaint. They moan in staccatos. What good are their bodies but to be used and abused? It’s their duty to serve. Bend them over a table, fuck them up against a wall, push their faces into filth, throw them, kick them, beat them. Breach and pierce and split and rip. They don’t mind. Man sized killing machines. Industrial, electrified men. Make them bleed. I fucked one once until his bowels came loose and the good lieutenant didn’t even notice.

Aren’t they innocent, those precious young men? Germany’s finest. Noble features, bright eyes, light hair, tan lines, peach asses and pink hairy holes. If only I could destroy them, fuck them to death. But they twitch like insects in their death throes, only to get back up again, uncurling the shiny chitin limbs. There is liquid steel in their veins. Vacant stares from crystalline eyes and venomous drool dripping from bared fangs. And I’m the one left feeling dead, oozing my last spoon of spunk and falling asleep slumped over their backs.

Put on the right uniform, order him down on his knees, kiss my boots, bend that back. And he obeys, heaving with joy. I shove a load of magic pills down his throat and make him down them with rum and the poor boy is all mine and I have him. Slide my disease ridden cock up his arse, scratching an itch. And down his throat, in that order. Make him choke, fill him, spoil him, soil him, he won’t mind. And once you have served me well go back to your comrades. Always cut your hair according to regulations and each morning shave your face and trim your nails and wipe that ass clean, outside and inside, scrape out the cum, pretty boy, before it festers.

Ah, those good men, so many to choose from, an endless supply. Until they run out of boys to make into men or until one day one of those yank boys in their terrific planes drops a bomb right down on me while I’m balls deep in some lad and we both blow up into one majestic cloud of meat and bones and shit and piss and cum. And they’ll have to scrape us from the walls and put us in a bag and bury it in a grave that says on it: two unknown German soldiers.


	3. Faunlet

Over his bed little Michael pasted pictures he would lovingly cut out of magazines, spending many a Sunday afternoon, scissors in hand, following with utmost precision the outline of a dashing soldier mid jump, a castle overseeing dark forests of secret adventure or a plenty-point stag caught in the alert moment before the lethal shot. Amongst the prominent martial figures there was young Göring before he turned ugly and fat and another pilot of the next war, our war. The young ace had been freshly decorated and smiled shyly for the camera, his embarrassment over these formalities thus immortalised long after his death. There were also a couple of actors - ladies and gentlemen from those films everyone had seen, surgically removed out of their respective scenery, and not missing of course was the old man Hitler himself, who upon my first visit to Michael’s room fixated me with a curious look from his big blue eyes (the photo was in black and white, but when I recalled the scene, as I did many times, I could clearly envision the dreamy blue of his eyes). 

Next to the pillow on his dollhouse bed, placed in the proper location that would allow sweet Michael to gaze at it before he fell into his innocent boy dreams, was the drawing of two men of the Sturmabteilung in tight embrace. The slighter one, bloodied and unravelling, was dying a blissful hero’s death in the stern elder’s burly arms (brownshirt, sleeves rolled up high). 

Although he was only three years younger than me, back then I thought myself completely a man and him merely a child and he too saw it that way and could not believe his luck when his older brother’s very popular friend (this being no exaggeration to flatter myself but merely fact) took interest in him and cared to spend his precious adult time with this lonely undergrown boy. Given these circumstances it was blatantly obvious to me in which fellow’s skin Michael imagined himself each tossing turning night. Yes, the role of the slain did suit well that meek boy, his pale complexion, blond locks and always wet looking eyes.

I first saw his room when one drowsy afternoon his brothers were out and the house empty and hot, the day’s heat trapped under the roof and outside crickets chirping with grating desperation. As he stood there in the middle of the room, out of place in his own four walls, I asked him if he wanted to be my girlfriend, to which he replied with a faint blush, long silence and a nod. I told him to undress and as he did, shedding the youth uniform button for button with ceremonial grace, over his shoulder that stern father Adolf seemed to cast at me a critical glance. 

I had seen Michael naked before when skinny-dipping in that lake just twenty bicycle minutes from here, at the youth camps of course and once when he and his brothers had washed themselves in a trough behind the house. I had never taken any interest in his physique, it being just like any other boy’s, but now in the intimacy of his room that delicate flesh was sacrosanct.

I made him lie down in his bed facing the wall and naked too I joined him and pressed my skin to his and we looked beautiful, the good boy trembling in my tight embrace. From the sweat we clung together like one and I promised him whispering that we could be closer still, joined like man and wife, if he just let me, just one moment, just a few minutes of pain and the vague notion of humiliation and loss wiped away with a kiss on the back of his neck.

When I forced myself into him as animals do, he cried a little and squirmed in distress. To such a filthy, degrading act no sane man would submit himself voluntarily. With a firm hand on the back of his head I directed Michael’s gaze to the picture of that blissful dying man and then again he knew to grit his teeth and submit until I was done.

This was repeated for a couple of months, whenever chance arose, and he never did get better at it, but that feeling of dissatisfaction, with which I left him hanging after my own release, hurting and longing, made him all the more keen to repeat the act until it was him asking me quietly when, oh, when we could do it again.

By the end of autumn I was sent to a school for the gifted youth to further my promising future military career and when I saw Michael again it was on the Eastern front. Under these terrible circumstances his sickly complexion and lacking physique no longer made him stand out from the men. He’d also grown to an average size, his hair was a dull brown now, the locks uncurled, only the face of a boy he had retained, that canvas stretched on the frame of a man. He then struck me at first sight as the type who would give himself to any man if only one asked. His wet eyes repulsed me. I was embarrassed by his proximity.

I had cherished the memory of those few precious months with him over the years, had erected monuments to them, had drunk from them in the desert, and now he had tainted the fountain, transformed the wonderful fair boy of my dreams into ugly banality - common like those abandoned women who for a piece of coin offered their buttocks between animals and filth.

I wasn’t too sorry when one particular grey day he wandered off into the fog and shot himself in the face.

His presence had sullied my memories. It had made me really quite sad. But now with him out of the picture I could return again to the tranquil state of that hot summer afternoon and our trembling embrace.


	4. Stalingrad

All the rotten bodies, piles and piles of it. The entire city is a slaughterhouse and we are the cattle. Every day we drag our worn out, starved bodies to the slaughter. An endless stream of blood runs from concrete tables, seeps through concrete floors and trickles down the dusty walls. Every house, every room and every street is littered with bones. A red gruel of human waste fills sewers and basements. The smell of rot permeates everything. It creeps through every crack and cloth. It lingers under my finger nails and clings to the inside of my nose. And there is nothing to eat. To feel so sick and be so hungry at the same time. When I dream I am back home. Mama is holding my hand at the butcher shop. The one around the corner with the blue sign and the clean white tiles and rows and rows of birds, game, ham, sausage and all the fresh red meat one could eat. I think one day I might awake from that dream and the filth will smell delicious and the fat black flies will hum songs about Erika, Lisa and Rosemarie and I will fill my shrunken, yearning belly with all the fresh red meat I can eat.


	5. Winter Eagle

By the side of the road, just a few feet away, like an animal that had been run over, picked up and thrown aside to make way, lies the body of a soldier. When he froze to death, in the madness where the cold was burning him like fire, he must have taken off his clothing, piece by piece, as he walked and stumbled and then laid down to sleep. And he still lay there as if only sleeping, beautiful like the dead look only in paintings. His skin was more brilliant than the snow, his body without a scar, velvety soft, and his hair crowned by ice crystals. No one could be moved to bury him and day after day the men passing by had to see him there and not one could avert his eyes from the promise in his faint smile: to one day die no more.


	6. Southern Gothic

Capt J’s men found the German hiding in a chicken coop, snow on the roof and feathers around his feet. Hiding may not have been the right word, his men later said and exchanged nervous looks - nervous about what? He had simply stood there, they said, still, waiting.

Like all of the bastards before him he looked miserable, dirty and tired, but a little more rotten too. Something aristocratic about him. Dark hair slicked back and the widow’s peak of a man twice his age, skin like wet paper stretching over blue veins, hollows of sickly purple under his deep-set eyes and those eyes - predictably: blue, but a blue of a dull and foggy kind like the rattlesnake’s before the shed. Of all the gaunt, hungry, utterly consumed looking men they’d taken prisoner so far this one looked particularly cadaverous.

He was an SS officer and didn’t mean to hide it. He could have easily dropped that cap with the sinister little skull somewhere by the side of the road and torn off his collar tabs (funny ones those were, like rotten, grasping hands - not like anything J had ever seen before), but they were all too proud for that, weren’t they, those fucking fanatics. You could see it in their eyes, dull and cold like iron and stone, incapable of expressing any emotion but pure unfiltered hate. As far as J was concerned, they were barely human.

The German’s lips (white, not a shot of blood in them) remained a condescending line as J ran down the usual questions: his unit, their strength, their position. Not even his name he would give, J had to take it by force, pulling the identification papers from the pockets of a heavy leather coat that was stained brown and red, as if the man in it had been literally wading through blood.

“Wolf-Heinrich?” J read the name off the document, undoubtedly butchering it with American pronunciation. “Some proper Nazi name you got there, momma must be so proud.” Chuckles around. Hard looks, unshaved faces, the smell of sweat, bodies strained for release. They wanted to see the prisoner hurt.

The German smiled like a snarling dog. His gums were as white as his teeth and of his teeth he seemed to have a couple too many. For the first time he spoke with a voice like smooth bourbon, tickling the hair on the back of J’s neck. Haughty bastard.

“Wolf-Heinrich Siegfried Hermann Wilhelm von Kleist,” he said in a tone as if schooling a child.

Oh, that got to J. Sudden memories of teachers and their arrogant little smiles. Sadistic, withered up hags with their powdered faces and their hair tied up so neat and their backs straight like they got something stuffed up their ass, always looking down on little J no matter how tall he grew. Continental accents - Oh, you don’t know that, you idiot, you inbred hick, you stupid dog? And the ruler across his fingers (howling like a dog indeed) and his pants at his ankles in the headmistress’ office.

J hit the German square in the face, closed fist. He dropped to the ground unconscious.

A glob of blood ran from his nose, dark and thick like machine oil, unnervingly slowly, like a fat leech squeezing out of its nest.

J could have the prisoner sent down the line, let someone else handle it, put him in some camp by the shore and let the intelligence squeeze his secrets out of him - and all the other dreck that would come floating up with it.

“He strikes me like the type who’d know important stuff,” he said into the silence of held breaths and swallowed coughs, “would be better if we keep him though. Intel down the line is too slow. Could crack him here.. I know I can. ” Hesitant nods all around. No one had asked and no one would object.

The German was still unconscious when he was thrown in the back of J’s truck, blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back and also tied to the seat on such a short leash that once he came back to it he could only wiggle like a worm. J would gladly also have stuffed his mouth had the prisoner raised his voice, but he was too proud to object and merely laid there, quiet and motionless, trying to look dignified when not thrown about by another bump in the road. In the rear-view mirror J could see how he opened his mouth then, as if hissing, but through the noise of the engine the sound did not reach his ear. He did like taking the bumpy road.

They had picked up the German at dusk and a few hours later the night was black except for a gravid rising moon. Not a star pinned to the sky, not even the light of a plane or muzzle flash to be seen. They had made good progress and for J and his men an abandoned farm house was as good as any place to hole up in for the night. 

Not intending to make his prisoner’s life any more pleasant and as a way to soften him up for further questioning come morning J considered leaving the German out in the cold, but as frail and pale as the man looked J feared he might not even survive the night. He also had to admit to himself, that his men were not always to be trusted with an item as controversial as a Jew-hating, kid-killing SS officer, so at last J decided his precious catch would have to stay with him for the night. He had the bound creature dragged to a small room in the basement. He had chosen that place for himself, because it wouldn’t be levelled by artillery in an instance and because it had a door that actually shut. Privacy was a luxury few could afford these days.

He left the prisoner in a corner, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back, he didn’t trust the man not to try to murder him in his sleep and there was a certain psychological benefit to putting him in such an uncomfortable and helpless position to ponder over all night.

J was lying on his back with one hand on his pistol, staring at the ceiling and a slit of light cast by a narrow window up high, waiting for the embrace of sleep, when from his subconscious it struck him that the prisoner was watching him. He turned to check. In the darkness of the cellar it was hard to make out any object clearly, shadows blending together to more unnerving shapes. He found the outline of the prisoner where he’d been dropped, but it seemed he had now curled up like a cat. Just a dark spot in the corner of the room, but yes, facing him, with his eyes covered, yet undoubtedly, the white piece of cloth making it much easier for J to see it, the German was looking right at him and like a droning noise that his mind had blocked out all the while suddenly breaking through into conscious awareness, he could hear it then, when he held his own breath, the other man’s heavy breathing, deep and laboured like from great pain or great pleasure. Suddenly it stopped and he heard the man sniffing like a dog taking a scent. Then it was quiet again.

Clutching his pistol tightly, J listened and waited for a long time. The cube of moonlight cast by the window wandered across the wall, but the noise did not return and eventually the blindfold seemed just a blindfold again, not those inhumane eyes, the German probably sleeping soundly for a while already, and so J too fell into a restless sleep.

In his dream the man in the corner was no longer man but the monster that had haunted his childhood; a tall figure, all black, standing at the foot of his bed and J in his room again, a little boy too weak to move a man’s limbs. With the flicker of a cinema projector the shadow grew hair like a wolf and eyes glowing like snuffed out charcoal buried in ash and long teeth from rotting gums, many of them, dripping with thick, gooey spit. From the foot of his bed - so very far away it seemed now as he was boyishly small again - the creature came forward, not walking or crawling but slithering like a snake, the whole body like one strong muscle, gently, caressingly sliding up his leg, grinding sensual pleasures, and settling on his chest, so heavy it pressed the air out of his lungs, stifling a scream stuck halfway up his throat. Face to face now with the creature J could see it was man and owl and wolf all the same. Drool dripped out of its mouth and on J’s face and it was warm and smelled of hunger and sick. With its long prehensile tongue the creature licked his face. It forced his mouth open with its beak and drew him into a tender kiss. 

When J woke up the German was on top of him, straddling him. He was still bound and blind, his mouth was at J’s throat, biting and licking and sucking on it with a wet, sexual slurping sound. He heard himself whimper and it occurred to J that he was being assaulted and that he should be terrified, that he should struggle and fight for his life. There was still the gun in his hand. He might be able to tilt it just a little bit and muster enough strength to pull the trigger. The German rose and J felt a sudden jolting hot pain in his neck as spurts of blood shot out of it in the arcs of a fountain.

The German’s mouth was smeared with blood, it had soaked his blindfolds, it was dripping from his lips, it was running down his neck and pooling under his collar. He swallowed down a gulp of it. He seemed to look down at J. Joyful now, healthy and strong, he smiled, bearing a row of awfully mundane, human looking teeth. 

“Tu das nicht,” he said, a soft buzz under J’s skull, and J understood and obeyed. He did not pull the trigger. He dropped the gun. 

The German bent down again to commence his feast. With the succulent touch of his tongue the pain of the wound faded away into numbness and black and then J felt very light, very warm, relieved of a heavy burden. Just like falling asleep to the sound of water dripping in the distance. The leaky faucet at the back of the barn that daddy never did fix. The house creaked, breathing in the night. Time stretched and compressed. Doves cooing in the attic. The warmth of sunrise coming over corn fields and under him a cooling puddle of piss, and little J is lying in his wet bed so very helpless and yet also content in this place and moment in time wishing it would last forever.


	7. and the pride of her heroes trample

They called themselves kazaki, cossacks, the proud and swift horseback riders. Some fought for mother Russia, some for Germany, but all of them always fought for themselves. They were a brutal bunch, the knights of the steppe, Mongol hordes, who knew no chivalry as the steppe knew none. They couldn’t afford to foster ill-placed ideals like dignity or mercy. And they always smelled like horses, whether they still rode them or carried the rifle instead, that smell wouldn’t wash off. And such beautiful clothing they wore, with many buttons on them and fur hats. Their name precedes them. 

They found young, innocent Hans, who had pretty blond locks under his helmet and who had never even shot a man, hiding in a hole in the forest, white birch trees over his head, covered with branches and moss. 

They didn’t bother to drag him far, before they tore down his pants, sending the buttons of his suspenders flying. In that moment - strange thoughts that you sometimes have in these horrible moments - Hans thought he’d never find them again, those buttons, them being as brown as that barren ground and how would he march then and hold a gun, while holding up his pants?

The silly distraction was instantly wiped from his mind when the first man broke him in. The initial pain of it was so sharp and deep, he could not have imagined a bullet to the guts to feel worse. But Hans's imagination was limited and his knowledge of pain was small. He learned that when they rode him, cruel and hard, one after the other. They ripped him open, and they beat him, and they broke his bones. 

And while he was dragged across the floor and fought over like a piece of meat between the wolves, he smelled them, unbearably intense, like sick horses left to themselves for many weeks, wet fur and rancid blood and mixed into it all the smell of their filthy members, sickeningly sexual, on his body and in his body, the sticky clumps of their semen and the smell of his own piss and his shit. 

They left Hans where they took him, face down in the mud.


	8. Der dicke Hermann

At the end of the road, under the yellow light of a streetlamp stood three young men in civilian uniforms. Their brown caps threw dark shadows over their faces hiding every feature but their grinning mouths. In profile it looked like they had the heads of dogs, long snouts and teeth bared to a snarl. I hid behind a car watching them as they pulled the cobblestones out of the street and threw them with strange precision into store windows, deliberately breaking some and sparing others. When they walked away the nails under their shoes went ‘click, click, click’. I listened and waited.

As soon as the sound had disappeared into the distance I ran home. I ripped my name off the plate next to the door bell and sat behind the closed door all night, listening for an opening door, a breaking window or the ‘click, click, click’ of nailed boots.

When I went to the office the next day the street was still littered with glass. Small shards of it in the cracks between the cobblestones reflected the sunlight like pools of water from an early morning rain. People stopped and stood and whispered. A whirlwind had blown through the city, shattering the windows of shops and apartments and then disappeared as fast as it came, leaving us all to wonder if it had just been a bad dream, were it not for all of those tiny crystals.

In 1933 the dogs in the brown caps formed the German government and they came and dragged me to their lair. Watching from behind closed curtains none of my neighbors saw a thing.

The new Germans dwelled in a water tower in the middle of an old working class district that once was red and now was silent. The tower that held their prisoners stood high above the many-eyed house fronts and in between the two worlds there were only 50 meters of trees and screams.

They brought me to the engine room, the belly of the beast. It was cold and wet and smelled like sewage. There were no windows, just a few weak light bulbs, which conjured up as many shadows as light. Many men with their sleeves rolled up past the elbow came ‘click, click, click’. They didn’t ask any questions, they had all the answers. I was an enemy of Germany, a spy, a sodomite, a communist, a Jew. I was everything that did not belong, all the things they hated and feared. They made me their golem, a beast of burden, a filthy mass of primordial sin formed into a human-like shape. Soon my limbs were swollen and purple from the beating. Naked and filthy I was in a sense born anew.

One day an old man came to play with me. He wore an expensive looking double-breasted suit jacket with a party pin on it, wide riding breeches and tall black leather boots, polished to reflection. He had the rough features of a prole, but judging by the way he walked and talked he thought himself an aristocrat. When he became excited he had a dirty mouth like an alley cat and dirty thoughts too. He put water in my bowels, filled me up until my belly became so swollen and breathing so hard I thought I would burst. I begged and cried and said I would do anything if he stopped. 

He told me that he was an important man and if I did well he would let me go back home. He only demanded that I held the water inside my body for some time.

Looking at his golden pocket watch he counted down each second. I tried very hard, but control - and to be the subject, not the object of it - was no longer part of my vocabulary. Crawling through the puddle of my own mess and begging him to let me try again, begging him to fill me again, I distantly remembered again what shame felt like.

Eventually I managed to please him. I was let go a week later, not knowing whether he had kept his promise or the men had simply gotten tired of me.

When I dragged myself up the stairs to my apartment the neighbors were holding their breath and listening behind closed doors. I called my employer to promise I would be able to come back to work in just a few days. He had already found someone to replace me. Permanent loss of vision in one eye and a nervous affection made it impossible for me to find employment again. I sold all of my belongings and emigrated.


	9. Sightseeing

On his first visit to the newly erected camp a small group of prisoners presented Himmler with gifts, which they had made themselves for this joyful occasion. He was given a big wooden plate for the evening bread, which had ears of wheat carved all around, and a bouquet of sweet-smelling pink flowers and a childish painting of a little lamb, delivered by a shy little girl with long black braids. When he patted her on the head, he thought he heard his adjutant laugh scoffingly behind his back, but when he turned to him, the young man wore only his usual cold expression of solemn obedience. 

Maybe it was the salty afterglow of that taunt which had egged him on and led him off the path designated for the famous guest, led him into the camp, to catch with some luck a glance of the inner workings of his very own creation.

It came as a surprise how few walls and fences stood between that sunny path with the little girl and bleak, stinking misery. The sight of the skeletal prisoners in their rags, the shaved heads and hollow faces, hit him like a wall. Disgust welling in his stomach forced him to his knees, throwing up half digested coffee and cake. 

His adjutant dragged him up by the elbow and wordlessly handed him a handkerchief. There was no expression on his face when Himmler looked at him, head shaking, mumbling apologetically that it was not correct, not right, not how he meant it to be, but when his adjutant turned away there undoubtedly was a sneering smile on his lips.


	10. I looked, and there before me was a pale horse!

It’s called Pervitin and it comes in red and blue tablet container with friendly round letters on it, like chocolate. He ate it like chocolate and for days it has now been in his veins, running like a mad horse, pale and starved. 

At rest he couldn’t rest, he heard that rhythm in his blood, hooves pounding. His own words came out too fast, stumbling over one other like a stampede. Everyone else was reading their lines too slow. Sounds were stretched short. The speed of his own jerky movements made him nervous. He was not in control, the stupid animal was.

In the third night the horse fell silent, dead and eaten. He was the hunter now.

First came the urge to fuck someone, fuck something, fuck like a blade rending flesh, a cold desire to destroy. The want to rip someone’s face off tickled in his fingertips. Visceral visions of soft flesh under his nails and warm juice to lick up. 

He took off his gloves. His hands were red and swollen, freezing. The cold came from the inside, he was sure of it, he knew it. It could only be a clever trick played by his body. He would not be able rip with hands like that, only to crush and squash. The thought was amusing to him and he laughed to himself. 

An officer, whose name he had forgotten and could only remember as _fuck and destroy_ , looked over to him and seemed concerned.

One time, when no one was looking, he rolled in the snow like a dog. It felt warm.

Combat, the good kind of murder, helped a little. In the quaint backyards, the windy barns, in dark basements, where tortured faces appeared in flashing lights. 

When he crawled closer on his belly like a wild beast, dragging his uniform through the mud, strangling the blood flow to his obnoxiously demanding sex. Just close enough to see their eyes when he blew their lights out.

The waiting was the worst. Waiting for artillery shelling to end, hiding from planes, always hiding from something, cramped together with his comrades in dark basements, waiting to soon be someone else’s tortured faces. In situations like that comrades were no longer comrades but a mass of bodies and eyes that asked to be fucked and destroyed. Some more than others. Harrowed faces and dull eyes, men just waiting for their soon demise. He avoided them, they spoke to something in him that made it harder to control the slippery fingers.

His friendly round containers were empty. He shot two Australian prisoners when no one was watching. They died disappointingly. 

Then he caught himself one of his own men. Out on watch he jumped the young officer. Tall one, but so frail, couldn’t get his spider leg fingers on the trigger of his Luger in time. He broke the officer’s wrist and twisted the weapon out of his hands with another crack and then he hit the man with the grip of his own pistol until he stopped moving.

The officer’s nose was broken in three pieces, the lower half of his face covered in steaming red, as if a hungry dog had ripped the jaws out. He was wheezing loudly from the blood running down his throat. His mouth was wide open, dumb and agape and his gaze was fixed on his assailant with horror like he had never seen in a man’s eyes. 

He slid a finger into the officer’s mouth, over the broken teeth. There was something sensual about it like you could only find in symbols, sexless imitations of sex. The man whimpered and closed his eyes. His mouth was a warm, wet hole. It made a sucking motion, which peculiarly turned into a bite; peculiar, because he could see where what had remained of his teeth dug into his skin, but he couldn’t feel it. He considered fucking that mouth but it frightened him, there was no end to it, a dark maw that would eat him up.

He flipped the officer over on his stomach and sliced his trousers open. He cut too deep, sliced the man open too, the skin splitting like an overcooked sausage, yellow stuffing spilled out. The officer screamed, flailed, cried and crawled away from him. He dragged him back by the ankles. 

He spread his legs to see where he could make his way in. The obvious choice was beneath him, dirty, not good. It needed to be clean, a pure white and red, crystalline. He felt like that now, white and bright, euphoric. Yet there remained some curiosity too. He had heard about it, men who did that sort of thing.

He put his bayonet in the officer. It went into his anus like it was made to take it, like labia parting, sliced and split open to receive his blade. The officer howled. When the bayonet went in deep enough to pierce his intestines he made a sound like a strangled cat. 

He tried to trigger it again by jabbing into that exact spot, meticulously pounding him open, irreparably destroying. The blade came out red and redder. He could feel it, like a part of himself, breaking into the body, he could feel the flesh giving way. He couldn’t have fucked him better himself.

The officer wouldn’t repeat the sound for him, he was eating mud and clawing at the earth, hoping maybe he could dig a way out of this fate or choke to death on the dirt.

He wasn’t done yet. He wiped the bayonet on a patch of snow and grass. Clean again. He would make himself a hole of his liking. He flipped the officer on his back again. The man’s face was covered in a grotesque mask of red and brown sludge. The only visible features were his eyes, bright little spots and that black maw, panting and babbling about mercy and death.

It was a little harder to get through the abdominal wall, but he was very determined. Logically he thought the bellybutton would be the easiest way in, but it was messy, irregular, not as pretty. He liked the clean white slate of the belly next to it better. The tip of his blade pushed a dent into the soft flesh of it, stretching the skin like a balloon ready to pop. 

The officer spoke of god, or gods. 

His belly didn’t pop, the bayonet suddenly just _went in_ , smoothly, without a sound from the officer's mouth.

He looked a while at the funny image. How deep the blade could go in unhindered. When he let go off the handle, it swayed back and forth with every breath.

The screams and the flailing picked up tenfold again when he grabbed the blade and turned it around like a drill, making the slit into a bigger hole. 

He didn’t want to look inside, something not right about seeing a man’s guts if they weren’t already hanging out of him. The amount of blood gushing out of the hole he’d made prevented such an uncomfortable incident.

When he had decided the hole was good enough to fuck, he suddenly found himself incapable of holding an erection. It was utterly frustrating. He could stuff his limp genital into the hole, but what good was it? It didn’t hurt the officer, it didn’t satisfy any of his cravings, it just taunted him, the absolute lack of feeling, just a bit of meat where it didn’t belong.

His vision was ruined. The officer’s sobbing annoyed him. It would not stop. Once he had let go of him the officer rolled around in the puddle of his own blood, curled up in the fetal position, as if that would stop the blood flowing from his guts. He was just a tangled bag of bones, and he howled like a baby.

A heavy weight came down on him then, an overwhelming disgust with that pathetic creature and an endless fatigue. He slit the officer’s throat. He washed himself clean in the snow and walked less than a mile to surrender to the Americans.


	11. Rest on your arm reversed

One of these days, an hour into the fifth interrogation of this kind, I ask that haughty bastard: 

“How much do you think you can take?”

He raises his eyebrows ever so slightly. We have already spent a couple hours with each other in the confines of this brightly-lit little interrogation room. We have grown accustomed to each other, almost fond. I know his narrative, the obedient soldier, the good officer, the front line hero, martyr of his men. And I’ve gotten very good at reading his subtle little mood swings.

“How much pain do you think you can take?” I ask again.

He has his arms crossed in front of his body, hands tucked in. The uniform he is wearing is evidently not his own, it’s too tight. He wouldn’t be so poorly dressed if he had the choice, he’s the kind of man who gazes at his own reflection. His posture isn’t helping, the fabric is pulling on the shoulders and straining at the seams. He reminds me of a pouting little boy, who wants his toys back. Oh, but I have your toys now. I walk in your garden, I eat from your table, I sleep in your bed. I have your toys and I have your family and I have you. And I’ll do with you what I want. I smile.

“You keep playing the tough one,” I say, “but you’re not tough, you’re not brave, you’re ignorant. The two can be easily mistaken for one another. When you raise your nose like that at me and give me that smug little smirk, you’re simply acting under the misconception that you are untouchable. You think I’m bluffing. You think you’re too important. You think I care about your nazi ranks. I don’t give a shit. You’re all the same scum to me. If I want to I’ll have you beat to a pulp. If I want to I’ll beat you to a pulp with my own hands.”

He looks at me with enough loathing for three of those bastards. He’s not even ashamed of the endless immensity of his ego. It’s like a medal, his very own cross of iron, hung off a steel collar, pushing up his chin to an ever arrogant expression. Some men are asking for it. 

I take a sip of my coffee. It’s cold. I push my papers into a neat little pile and place my pen on top at a thirty degree angle. 

I get up from my chair and circle around the table. On the way I wink at the dimwitted guard standing by the door. He winks back at me. He’s not the brightest, but he can read a mood.

Now I’m standing behind the bastard. He still keeps looking at the same spot, two inches above the place where my eyes used to be. He almost does not flinch, when I put my hands on his shoulders. They are so small and bony, like a bird’s, they disappear almost completely under my hands. Maybe I could crush them. In 1918 they used to call me the Butcher. They thought it was funny that I held the pen more confidently than a club. I was always of the opinion that some words need physical presence to back them up.

“Hands on the table,” I say and he obeys. His shoulder blades flutter up under the weight of my hands. I gently press his shoulders forward until his forehead meets the table. He doesn’t resist. The position exposes the appetising white of skin that he hides under the high collar of his uniform. I could probably choke him with one hand. I put my right on his neck to test the feeling of it. We fit perfectly and his pulse is under my fingers. A little pressure and his pulse is pumping into my finger tips.

“How much pain do you think you can take before you scream? How much until you cry? How much until you piss yourself? How much until you beg me to stop?” I say, enjoying the way the words sound, the crudeness of them, enjoying the way they feel on my tongue, spat out, enjoying the way they feel under my fingers in the tense rhythm of his blood. 

I let go of him. He exhales audibly and is embarrassed to do so. Following the mishap his breathing is of unnatural regularity. He’s forcing it, trying to calm down as not to lose face again. 

Although his arrogant demeanour suggests he thinks himself cut above the ranks, he is still a soldier and as a soldier he is well behaved and conditioned to obey. Without any need for verbal or physical corrections he knows not to move until told otherwise, remaining in the position I bent him into. 

I circle around the table, once, twice, and look him up and down, the torso almost touching the table, forehead resting on it, the slick hair dishevelled and next to it his delicate hands, palms pressed flat, a stiff kind of prayer. I light a cigarette, smoke it and watch him silently. In the end I stub the cigarette out on the back of his hand. His fingers dance over the smooth surface of the table. 

Surely the pain would be easier to take if he could hold on to something or if it made any sense at all that. If there was any reason for it but my personal entertainment. When I make him look up his lips are bloodless and his eyes wet. For now I’ve made my point. He’s taken back to his cell. And I need a moment for myself to calm down and pull myself together.


	12. Insomnia

Nowadays I only look in the mirror to shave, an unusual habit aboard a submarine, but I can not stand having a seaman’s beard. I have tried. It’s itchy and scratchy and I hate the way it makes me look, like a mangy mole. Sometimes I fail to recognize the man staring back at me out of the mirror. He looks like a stage actor, covered in white powder, devoid of any colour except for the red around the eyes, which looks all the more sickly for the contrast. I brush my teeth, I spit out blood, I shave, I go to my bunk and I can not sleep. I calculate the amount of water over my head. 182 metres, 182000 litres, 18.86 bar, 192.33 tonnes lie in wait for a mistake, a malfunction, a crack in the hull, waiting patiently to cave my brain in. I can not sleep. Johann and Fritz and Wilhelm are playing cards 1.43 metres away from my cortex. Johann talks about his father’s farm, green fields, white sheep, the shore and the sea. I can’t stand his nasal voice, I can’t stand his inflection, or that he laughs like a goat, and when he combs his fingers through his greasy hair, scratching the scalp with a grating noise. I turn around and face the wall. Behind it is an endless ocean and I can hear it. My bones hurt. The bed is too hard, the walls are too close, I can not sleep. I get up, squeeze past my lounging comrades and I work my shift. There is surprising strength still in my body. I feel better than ever, exhilarated. I follow my orders, I work the engine. The pistons resound through my body. My bones vibrate. Their rhythm becomes my heartbeat, going faster and faster, speeding at 17.2 knots. Afterwards I make a poor job of washing the oil off my hands. Although I am not hungry I eat. I get reprimanded for the dirt under my nails and wash them again, scratching, scratching down to the flesh. I watch that hollow fellow in the mirror. I brush my teeth, I spit out blood, I shave, I go to my bunk and I can not sleep. When I put my ear to the hull I can hear the sonar echoing through the ocean. When will our calls be answered? When will they rip this casket open and sink us to the dark depths? What a great relief it would be if the hull squeezed us to a pulp and spat our juicy remains out into the salt of the sea. I still can not sleep.


	13. Berghof

“Got a light?” the officer asks. 

There is a cigarette between the fingers of his right hand, and a distinct lack of lighter in the other, which is holding instead rather gently a pair of fine leather gloves. 

The tall guard, leaning up against the wall of the building and staring ahead at the dull alpine vista, had not taken notice of the young man’s approach. Mustering him dismissively he seems to have no intention to answer the soft spoken request. 

Slow curls of smoke from a cigarette stuck at a careless angle between his lips get trapped under the visor of his cap. His mouth twitches as if to smile. The lips don’t fit his face right, they are too lush and full for the hard cut of his jaw. He takes a deep drag. Now the officer can clearly see the scars running across the guard’s face. He looks older than he is, but his eyes are those of a boy on the playground, the sparkle and daring, so eager to pounce and play. It must be very dull being up here all the time, loitering around, doing nothing but looking to seem important, the officer thinks. 

Taking another drag, the guard blows smoke in the officer’s direction. 

“Rauchen verboten”, he says. 

The officer smiles coldly and tugging the cigarette between his lips, he takes a step closer. Now he too disappears from the sight of the chattering guests on the balcony above. He leans forward on tiptoes, as far as the tall riding boots allow it, and lights his own cigarette using the tip of the one hanging lazily from the guard’s lips. 

Before the officer can retreat again the guard grabs him by the belt, sliding one hand under the leather that is so tightly wrapped around the slim waist. He pulls him closer. For a moment the officer manages to stay in this position, balancing on the tip of his boots, stretched out, striking a figure as graceful as a dancer, before he loses his balance. His hands shoot forward to brace for the impending fall onto the guard. He drops his gloves. Stopping his fall his hands come down hard on the guard’s shoulders, pinning the heavier man up against the wall. 

The sudden onslaught of circumstantial violence pleases the guard. He grunts. He grins, holding the cigarette between his teeth. 

His hand is still stuck under the officer’s belt, now at an uncomfortable angle. He slides it out from under the belt, twisting it, his fingertips brush over the buttons on the officer’s tunic (fine fabric, fashionably short), his palm comes to rest on the fly of his trousers (wide breeches, small hips). The touch is too heavy to have been accidental. The officer feels a sudden urge to flee. He does not and the guard remains trapped and the hand remains where it was, shamelessly fondling a hardening bulge. 

They don’t break eye contact. The guard’s cigarette burns down to a stub. The officer can’t stand the guard’s brazen stare. Arousal makes him avert his eyes. 

Mindlessly tracing through the fabric the hard outline of the officer’s cock, the guard says: “It’s a shame I won’t get to suck your dick.” Then he motions towards the hands that keep him pinned to the wall. “Now if you don’t mind, duty calls.” 

On his way back to the party he doesn’t turn to look at the officer again. Pleased with himself he’s humming a tune. 

Come nightfall they meet again like drifters in the same spot and under the cover of darkness the guard kneeling reverently receives the officer’s cock and the officer in turns offers his splendid equestrian thighs for release. When years later they meet again at the front, neither is willing to recall what had happened at Berghof.


	14. Geheimes Deutschland

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for Stauffenberg and George

Come and sit with me, young prince. Lay your head on my lap, let me stroke your dark locks. How beautiful you are. Don’t lower your eyes, dear boy, they reflect the sky that birthed you. Listen now, Hyacinth, allow my words to kiss your soul. Let me be your guide through the barren deserts. Follow the wise man in the star-spangled cloak. I will show you temples and obelisks, old empty halls buried in age’s sand. I will teach you to strike the snake and tame the falcon and how to make the secret nectar under heaving cedar trees. I will make you, child, and I will kill you. Ah, now you shiver with anticipation. Rejoice, holy knight, when I have formed you, you will be glorious and gloriously you will be bound, and beaten, and slain. A thousand arrows will pierce you in Apollo’s grove and from each wound shall come forth the morning light of our new dawn. And all the stars will rise again and you among them, eternal light from mortal dust.


	15. Ehrendolch

Something about that dagger spoke to him. The shine of its blade and those dark letters embedded in the light. “Meine Ehre heißt Treue” it said, but when he held it in his hands and stroked it gently like a small animal, it seemed like the lines fell apart, scuttled like ants and rearranged in front of his eyes into letters he did not recognize. Sometimes it did not speak, but whispered. When he held his ear to the blade it hummed a constant rhythm. Not Morse code, more like a beat or, no, a chant. The longer he listened, the more it started to sound like a song he might recognize and if he listened just a little longer, he thought, he might remember the lyrics too, but the closer he came, words almost forming in his mouth, so dry on the tip of his tongue, the quieter it sung. Eventually he gave up on understanding it altogether and treated it instead like the relic of a nameless god. He made the rules of his church up himself, but the dagger never did object to his worship and on a pious day, when the air was heavy with the smell of burning flesh, he thought it felt a little warmer and hummed a little faster.


	16. an irrelevant occurrence

From a plane’s perspective MG nests look like anthills and trenches like paths trodden by wandering animals of prey. As you cradle his body in your arms he moans and whispers your name as if you were his sweetheart back home. You feel warm between your legs and wet from that dark red soup of his bile and blood.


	17. Battle of Berlin

They dragged the girl out from under a half-collapsed table in a place that had once been a kitchen with good china and expensive silverware and was now bombed into a pile of rubble, cooped up by the toothlike remains of its walls. She had lain still and played dead, quiet like a fawn, and they had only found her because a nice auntie had pointed them to where she was hiding in exchange for her own skin. They thought the little thing was a boy at first, as she was dressed in a tattered boy’s uniform, with dirt in her face and her long braids hidden under a military type cap, but when they ripped the clothing off her body she cried like a girl and they took her like a woman, each man tearing her a little more until their little toy broke and they threw it away where they had found it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Die rote Armee ist frei vom Gefühl des Rassenhasses. Sie ist frei von solch einem entwürdigendem Gefühl, weil sie im Geiste der Gleichberechtigung der Rassen und der Achtung der Rechte anderer Völker erzogen ist.


	18. Wounded Comrade

Bronze sheen of sweat on his bared chest, and the eyes of boyish innocence, merely a reflection of the sky above, bright, so very bright, glaze of drug mania melting into eyeball whites. He coughs up a bit of blood, wheezing like a cat struggling to get out a hairball. "You’ll be fine”, I say (my hand in his hand, I am kneeling by his side) and he smiles with blood speckled lips and grape juice stained teeth and he calls my name under his breath as if no one but me was allowed to hear.


	19. the wound is the place where the light enters you

A flash of light, the snap of a gun. Scalding heat like blades of the sun rips through cloth and punctures your skin. It settles, a ball of pain in your guts, and through the gaps you run out red-hot. Much too bright, the boreal whites, blinding your sight, and your ears drowning with the chiming of bells, their distant little whispers. Your last breath is stuck somewhere between larynx and tongue. And quietly you dissipate into soil.


	20. Revenge

My favourite guard is as tall as a giant. His hair is the palest blond. His eyes are tiny grey pebbles. He smiles like a shark and his nose is crooked. Sometimes I imagine stories for him: what music he listens to after work, what his first kiss was like, what happened to his nose. None of the others pay attention to him like I do. Blind to beauty when it strikes them all they do is work and sleep and moan. But I know what it means when his nostrils flare and he lets his baton slide through his fingers, in and out. Someone will get a beating. _Tip-tip-tap_ , two to the head and one to the groin.

 _Me, me, me, do me_ , I want to scream but I am good and I don’t. I work. I am quiet. I obey. And I hope that despite it all one of these days it will be me who gets the baton. 

I think maybe he spares me intentionally. He’s so clever, he knows that I want it. Sometimes I think he’s looking at me and his lips raise to a snarl. I

I must be daydreaming. I’m so hungry. It’s hard to think and not think of him. Dreams become tangible. Boots on the floor, a familiar pattern, the slight limp. I wish I was a little ball of meat, soft and squishy and his to use. 

He never does hurt me. And then they come and free us, Americans with their clean clothing and fat cheeks and loud anger and wide smiles. He doesn’t run, he’s not the type. He stands there, strong and tall with his head high and his nostrils flare but now we have the baton and the Americans won’t stop us; they watch like visitors in a zoo. 

_Tip-tip-tap_. He screams just like we did. And then he screams worse, shrill and wild. It’s hard to hear the sound of his cracking skull over the cheers and the grunts and the laughter. In the end he looks at me, just me, always just me, and I’m sure in his last moments he regrets having toyed with me like that. Cruel men find cruel ends. I’m free and life goes on.


	21. Hippocratic Oath

Isn’t it peculiar in which circumstances deranged obsessions long incubated come to light and although dormant for many years they suddenly take hold of you with overpowering force? A small body lies in my arms, a good soldier. I cradle the man who would be considered a boy in any other time and he too is holding on to his broken form as blood and life run out of him, unstoppable. What good would it do to stop it? He has no eyes to see, no legs to walk, his hands are twisted claws but he still has a tongue and he can whimper and cry for his mother like a little boy. I stroke his hair and kiss his cheeks and overcome by an inexplicable urge, I drop my spit on his open lips and he licks it and swallows it like wine or maybe mother’s milk.


	22. The Benefits of Being a Prison Guard

Hans was a handsome, manly kind of guy, a bit of a Siegfried maybe, tall and strong with pink scars on his chest, speckles like paint drops, and a nose like an eagle’s beak, always held high, glaring down at me with steely eyes, when I made him mop piss off the floor or clean out the shit house. And it was that haughty look that made me want to fuck him.

I knew if I got him alone he’d be fighting me off and he hadn’t had a proper meal in weeks but he’d still win and then he’d be punished, send to the dark cell or the hot cell or the gallows, but I wouldn’t get to fuck him. So I got myself another friend - a yappy, strong fellow by the name of John - and each of us got a knife and we cornered Hans in his cell. I was straight with him, telling him I wanted to fuck him and such, and that came as quite a shock to him. He stammered that wasn’t what he was and then that it wasn’t what he wanted to be, which sounded like quite a different story to me, but we weren’t patient with him, weren’t going to wait for him to come to terms with it. I just told him we’d rape him if he didn’t comply, then I beat him and John beat him too. I put the knife to his throat and to his eyes, and that did the trick. 

I ordered him to strip, to turn around, to spread his legs and put his hands on the wall. I greased myself up and told him to grease his own hole, put in a finger, fuck himself a bit since he’d never been penetrated before, and he did that too. Then I went in, very gently and very slowly stretched his tight asshole open. He was a virgin no doubt, he groaned and moaned and wouldn’t stop saying that it hurt, sometimes in one language and then the other. And I had no doubt that it did, the way he was clenching around my dick and I even pulled out a bit for him, fucked him only with shallow thrusts. I wanted this to be our thing, something I could do to him again, maybe eventually he’d like it too - but this was a joint venture, John wanted his turn and he got it before I finished myself (it’s hard to get off when you’re getting your dick squeezed off). I had to let him have his go and he didn’t hold back, he fucked Hans like some loose hand-me-down and Hans didn’t moan and groan no more. My dear friend got so carried away, I had to tell him to slow down. I didn’t want him to break poor Hans - well, he didn’t break him, just broke him in a bit and made him wet for me. 

We took turns fucking him to the end of our shift and he was rather tame to me afterwards. Once you’ve allowed someone to fuck your ass that’s just kind of what you do, you don’t get to change your mind.


	23. his body was a playground for the nazi elite

He preferred cold bathroom tiles to the soft comfort of a bedroom, the smell of piss in his nose and foul water soaking his breeches. Or to be entirely naked and on all fours, like a pig wallowing in filth. He could think himself as merely a thing to be used by better men than he was and there was no shame in that, suffering ennobles. Yet he hid his face in his hands and bit his palms, because he couldn’t help but whimper like just a thing should not.


	24. White Gloves Stained Red

It was a mild day on the brink of autumn. Just that morning I had seen under the beech tree behind Achim's house the first signs of summer’s decline in the shape of an orange leaf that came flying down with a gentle, cool breeze and perched on my shoulder like a small bird. In the afternoon we came together to say goodbye to the summer, to the land and each other, sitting under that very tree at a long oaken table, which carried the weight of a dozen bottles of French wine, beer, loaves of fresh bread, butter from the cows behind the three hills and all sorts of sliced meat, sausage and cheese. We - that was the remains of my graduating class, those who were not at the front or in a grave, a couple men, civilians and a speckled mix of uniforms, Otto and Wilhelm and Willy and Kurt and Hans and Erich and Ulrich and Paul and Winfried and Joachim and Achim and Achim's little wife Grete, the stout little lady of the house, who had prepared the farewell feast at her husband's behest.

And Siebold, who was immaculately dressed in his summer uniform, head to toe in white, except for the two black pieces of cloth on his collar, on one of which were embroidered two white lighting bolts, and with the exception of the black boots that were freshly shined. How very neat he always looked. To imagine him looking like that behind a barbed wire fence, stepping on a worn out prisoner’s face.

He had come carrying flowers in his slender hands, white gloves and white flowers, looking like a handsome young bride. The flowers were a gift for Grete and placed in a vase on the table that happened to be positioned such that from where I was sitting half of Siebold's face disappeared behind the bouquet of blossoms and often that afternoon I could not tell if he was smiling or not. The white of his uniform, or possibly that red wine, gave his cheeks a rosy tint, and so I thought he looked happy even when his eyes did not.

A red dusk was settling in, and we were glowing, laughing and drinking. The sun was slowly sinking, and would soon disappear behind the roof of the house, its last rays still shimmering in the treetops and throwing long shadows over the tall lawn, over the tired looking vegetable beds that had already been harvested, and into the deep thickets of blackberry and belladonna. Here Siebold led me by the hand, the gesture rekindling some idle memories from a time that seemed incredibly distant now, when we were little and innocent too. He still wore his gloves, which gave the touch of our hands a distant quality, like caressing the pages of a beloved book without even the desire to read a word.

Together we passed through the spotted light and darkness of the garden’s undergrowth until he stopped by the pond, where long fern leaves bend over the dark surface, gazing at their own reflection. Letting go of my hand, he leaned on the old ivy tree by the pond’s marshy edge. I noticed that he had taken two white carnations from his gift to Grete and put them through one of the buttonholes of his tunic. I was reminded of Vienna and of Bohemia, when we had marched in wearing flowers and flowers were thrown at our feet and crushed under our heels. All of this, observations and associations are still well preserved, memory stacked upon memory, and on the very top, that image of Siebold framed in dark green, coyly holding his peaked cap in his hands, a slurred smile on his lips, looking as if he was hiding a parting gift, a little memento to slip in my pocket for me to take back to the front.

There was no alarm, no warning or signal of any kind, only the white trail left by a plane high above. How very peculiar that this single plane lost in the vast empty sky dropped a single bomb here, where there was nothing but farms and fields and forests as far as the eye could see, and how peculiar that this one stray bomb found its target in Achim's little home just as all my old friends were gathered there, and that it struck the house just as Siebold placed his hand on my shoulder, adjusting his weight, leaning closer to whisper in my ear. His words were cut off by one terrific blast and all that remains of it are some meaningless syllables and his warm breath on my cheek.

The shock wave threw us both to the ground. As I was used to being treated like this by the machinations of war, I quickly recovered and after the initial confusion it was my first instinct to jump up and run back to the house, of which I could see from here only the roof, or what had once been a roof, and was now only a hole, the heavy wooden beams of the old house standing out like the jagged broken bones out of a gaping wound. I had not even taken notice of Siebold, my eyes still fixed on the roof, but a sudden premonition of something even more terribly wrong struck me and I turned to him.

His face was now of the same ashen white as his uniform. He was kneeling and struggling to get up, one hand digging into the mossy grass and the mud, his knees sinking into the wet soil. The other hand was clutching his stomach. Between his twisting fingers the white fabric was torn and red, and that little round red spot grew rapidly, growing and flowing downwards onto his trousers and seeping into the white of his gloves. It all seemed to happen far too quickly, like the projection of an old silent film, in which the little figures flew by with such haste, or maybe it was just me, who was frozen in time as I stared at the surreal image of the man dissolving inside out.

Siebold's lips opened and closed without a word or a sound, his eyes professing his disbelief. He slid his hand under his tunic searching for an explanation. As soon and suddenly as he found the wound the reality of it all struck. Sweat broke out on his forehead and between his brows, tears welled in his eyes and his face twisted into a pained grimace.

"Dear God," he said to himself and to me he said, "..look, look, look!"

He opened his tunic like heavy stage curtains, revealing a gash deep in his stomach and wide open, and by that hole his intestines were laid bare and they squirmed and trembled like fat worms, the poor creatures disturbed in their warm hiding place. Stronger than the smell of blood was the unbearable stench of faeces as his guts had been torn and were oozing their contents into the cavity of his stomach.

Siebold moaned and threw up. As he bent over blood and liquid shit spilled out of him and he caught the brown soup in his cupped hands as if he meant to pour it back in or to drink it.

We laid him on the table between the broken crockery, scattered flowers, half-eaten food and spilled wine, and we stood around him, taking turns holding his hand and the blood kept running out of him for another five hours of terrible torment. Then he was finally dead. The country doctor arrived a short while later. Except for the rats in the attic Siebold was the only victim of this air raid.


	25. Hero Worship

The captain sports a seaman’s big bushy beard. It's perfectly spotless, like the sailors in the paintings, covering much of his haggard face with hair that is coarse like wire to the touch and almost as grey. The uniform is loose on his wartorn frame, it must have fit quite nicely at some point, he must have been quite dashing.

There is a marriage photo on the back of the door of his bunk, a young, clean-shaven man in dress uniform vaguely resembling this husk of a man is holding a tan brunette in his strong arms. They look very much in love.

The new lad recognizes the young man from the magazines he used to read, before it was his time to serve in the war, those magazines about great soldiers, great deeds, battles won, real and imagined, facts interblending with fiction. Torment is well hidden between the lines, in often practiced, mantric phrases of speech.

Across his captain’s face grim death is written loud and clear. He’s been out too many times. Between the motions of the speech, with which he welcomes the replacement crew onboard, he looks like the sick do in their last hours, a transparent piece of paper with a face drawn on it, flickering in the wind.

Later the captain draws the new lad into his bunk. It’s terribly tight in there, a crushing privacy that seems less privilege than burden. The smoke of the captain's cigarette fills the small space like a chimney. He is too tired for orders and it’s not necessary, the matter is self-explanatory. 

“I will need you,” he says.

The lad is still in the dress uniform he wore when he waved his mama goodbye just hours ago. Two rows of buttons on the front and the hat with the cute little ribbon. He is a farmer’s son. His cheeks are red, his breath warm, his body soft and strong and full of life. The captain pushes him with his back up against the wall, only softly, weakly, and the young lad follows the indication. With practised swiftness he unbuttons the front of lad’s trousers and feels around in his underpants, finding his limp penis. He masturbates him to erection. It takes a while, the lad standing frozen like a hare, the captain leaning on him, stale breath on his shoulder, that beard itching his neck. There is no admiration left in him for that husk of a man and the reaction is entirely physical.

Once his genital is hard enough to be of service, the captain reaches for a jar of grease by the bed and applies it generously, sliding a big chunk up and down the shaft until heat and friction melt it down.

“You’re big,” he says matter-of-factly. He is pleased, but can not muster excitement.

Turning his back to the lad he pulls down his own trousers. He smells like sweat and semen and many men. His ass is covered in red sores. For a lack of meat on his cheeks, his anus is visible, glaring at the lad like a swollen red puffy eye. It's afflicted by some venereal disease, cooked up by the combined forces of the European armies. It looks wet and smells rotten. Open by half an inch, the small round black hollow is hungry to be filled.

The lad averts his eyes. He puts his back flat to the wall, trying to become part of the interior, a cog in the machine vessel rather than man, who can feel disgust or shame, or be violated by the use and abuse of his body.

The captain bends over, resting his forehead on the opposite wall of the tight bunk. They are scrunched up in the small space, limps and flesh pressing together. His anus gapes open. Light note of feces. He shoves his fingers into his rectum, pushing around in there to make way. With the other hand he grabs the lad’s penis by the base, holding it right like a vice. Then he slowly slides it into his guts, swallowing it all the way to the base with a wet sound. Having his intestines adequately stuffed, he emits a satisfied groan as if he’d finally got to scratch a terrible itch on his back.

“Hold your erection, “ he says to the lad and the lad tries, wrapping his finger tight around the base of his disobedient genital.

The captain moves back and forth, penetrating himself with hard, jolted movements. His penis becomes erect. It’s well shaped and well proportioned, aesthetic, but useless. Like a deranged ascetic, he does not touch himself, receiving pleasure merely from the stimulation of his prostate. But the size and the length of the lad's softening penis do not suffice to make him feel like he wants to feel, terribly stretched and deeply violated.

“Put your fingers in my ass, fuck me, now,” he says, need and want breaking his voice

Despite his revulsion at the sight of the stinking hole swallowing his penis, the lad obeys, sliding his big fingers into the captain’s red guts and penetrating him deeply.

“Yes, yes, yes..” the man mutters, drifting off, tensing and slacking and then ejaculating silently, dripping transparent thin semen on the smooth metal floor.


	26. Mengele

The little rodent doctor slides his hands into a pair of rubber gloves. His coat is white. There is a light brown spot on the front, right above his hip, a little to the left and about as big as a hand stretched wide, that never quite washed out. Over the repeated disgruntlement of having the coat returned from the laundry and that spot still on it, a little paler, a little softer around the edges, but still there, glaringly, he has forgotten what it once was or who and why. Were he to look through his notes, he might find the page with the red fingerprints, where he detailed an experiment that involved the opening of the abdominal wall (human, alive, not sedated) and the probing with all sorts of instruments. Not detailed on these pages would be the moment when he pushed an acid filled syringe in the abdominal hole and how thrilling it was to see the body open and close like a sucking mouth around the thick steel tube. He withdrew the syringe and shoved it back in again. The guts made way like parting folds. The subject’s eyes glazed over and with a muffled moan it emptied its bladder. He repeated the motion single-handedly, while the left came to rest on the front of his coat, squeezing his hardening cock through the fabric in synch with the syringe’s penetration, slowly first and once he was erect, he pushed the syringe in harder and faster and as deep as it would go, all the way through. He came in his pants. The subject was dead, the guts all twisted and torn in a foul smelling mess. Failure, he scribbled in his notebook that day.


	27. A Doctor and his Patient

Three months into the war chief physician Münzel bought himself a rather expensive medium format camera and an even more costly lens, which allowed him to take impressively close shots. Inspired by a colleague’s suggestion and a general feeling of awe at the prospects of technology, he began to document his work. As part of his medical routine he now took photos of his sedated patients, their terrible wounds, his perverse tools and the step by step act of operation in a series of voyeuristic images, which with time developed into his own style of unforgivingly brutal still lives.

His favourite subject, which quickly made up most of his artistic output, both in the field of photography and medicine, was one dashing cavalry officer from a rich family. He had come in with the uniform still hanging in shreds off his minced body.

The handsome, yet tragically destroyed young man received flowers every Friday from a certain someone, who chose to remain anonymous. Sometimes it was a bouquet of roses, sometimes carnations, or tulips, lilies, but all of them were spotlessly white. These deliveries arrived just in time to replace last week’s wilting bouquet, yet often the patient’s room was filled with the sickening sweet smell of dying flowers, which barely concealed the sharp edge of disinfectant and urine.

The baroness, his mother, never did visit, but she had paid for a single room and the chief physician’s loving care, which helped isolate her precious boy. This circumstance allowed the doctor to develop an intense passion for the young man, one of the like that he could only foster in privacy. Soon the patient was all alone in his doctor’s hands and how busy he kept those nimble fingers. Between the shot of the camera and the cut of the scalpel, life was running out of his pretty officer all the ways.

His mouth had been torn open and shredded by a terrible explosion. What remained of teeth and tongue had to be removed. As a result he drooled uncontrollably and the moist wound attracted flies, which, when he slept, crawled over his face and squeezed through his bandages, into his mouth and down his throat. This usually caused him to wake up, coughing up the fat little insects with an expression of terror that never did lose its intensity. Yes, what intense eyes he had and how he could glare. If he had not been beautiful before, he had undoubtedly been proud.

The drooling did not cease even when Münzel decided to close the mouth hole almost completely, sewing all its shreds back together into a rosy smooth mosaic and leaving only a little opening, big enough for the patient’s feeding tube.

Then the patient oozed pus from the stumps of his four amputated limbs, in particular from the legs, which were sawed off especially close to the body. Three weeks into his care the stump of the left leg had gotten so badly infected that the doctor first scraped the soft rotten flesh off the bone and then amputated the leg entirely, down to the hip.

Unfortunately the wound rot returned, now afflicting what had remained of the young man’s genital. This worsened his incontinence from a psychological to a medical condition and eventually necessitated the insertion of catheters of increasing diameter.

Münzel took this task upon himself, as the nurses were not to be trusted with the delicate procedure. While decently capable of care and technique in other patients, in particularly when it came to dashing lads, who were not missing too many limbs and could still wear a tragic smile on their face, the girls seemed to be unconsciously repulsed by his marvellous specimen. Their haste to leave the patient’s room as soon as possible had many times resulted in a needlessly violent penetration and tearing of his urethra.

Once the doctor had taken over this task, there were no more internal tears and the blood disappeared from his patient’s urine, which was but a small success. Changing the catheter also allowed the doctor to regularly masturbate his patient. Curiosity had prompted him to do so, merely to see if the sexual organs were still functional. At first the young man had reacted terribly to the sexual stimulation. He had squirmed in his wormish fashion and emitted that guttural wailing moan, which was his only way of communication now. This dramatic behaviour seemed rather silly to Münzel, given that the patient had been subjected to much more painful procedures. He told the young man rather sternly to comply lest he want to be strapped down for it or have his morphine dosage reduced. This fixed his unbecoming behaviour. The result of his efforts was not particularly impressive, less manly projection of vitality than a slow pathetic running out, occasionally even accompanied by effeminate tears.

No matter how much he bandaged, nipped, and stitched and cut, his patient was just constantly leaking, weeping, his very essence running out of every orifice; blood, spit, urine and faeces, occasionally vomit, and semen and pus and tears.

Months passed and the flowers kept on coming, yet no visitor disturbed their idyll, the photographs of his cavalier filled the doctor’s books and his cavalier’s eyes were still glaring at him full of hatred and pain. There was only one thing Münzel still desired and that was consummation. He had already envisioned it all, framed it in little squares. First he would cut his patient up all the way from bottom to top, feel around in his still warm innards and lay them out for the camera, one by one. Then he would inspect them all to his heart's desire and document their decay and destruction in minuscule detail. Eventually he would have to put them back in and sew the body back up, before delivering the remains to the baroness. The casket would be closed of course.

But death would simply not come, as if the worm was still holding on, waiting for something.

It occurred to Münzel one day, as he found his patient staring longingly at the wilted flowers by his bedside, that the young man was holding on to some sentimental feelings, even love maybe, for the one who sent those flowers, and that it was this love and these flowers which fed his determination to live. This made him angry. He sedated the patient. Making a very small cut in his abdominal wall, he inserted two flowers from his bedside, stalks of Gypsophila, into his stomach, sliding the little flowers somewhere between his guts. Having closed the small wound, he then instructed the nurses to discard any further deliveries of gifts, in particular those terrible flowers.

Two weeks later his patient was dead, of broken heart and intra-abdominal infection.

In the mortuary Münzel cut him open and to his surprise he found the flowers perfectly preserved in a nest of festering guts that had nourished them all those days. He put them in a vase in his office, but torn from the warm comfort of their moist bed, they died within a night.


	28. Christmas Party

It’s 1942, five days to Christmas, the office Yuletide party coming to an end, long past midnight and I’m walking down the long dark hallway of the office looking for the boss to pick him up, drive him home and return him to his concerned wife. 

There is this long hallway leading up to his office, tall heavy wooden doors left and right and just at the end the hallway makes a right turn and that’s where his office is and a dim light shines the way. I

I didn’t have a single drop of alcohol, never do, if I can avoid it and duty makes for a good excuse. It’s not intoxication but that clarity of mind which changes my perception of the dark building and transforms the brutal architecture of a mundane office into a temple of paper. 

My steps fall quiet, leather soles on marble flooring. Slowly I walk by every closed door, ready to halt and disappear into the darkness as a black-clothed spectre if one were to open, but none do, and I sneak forward towards the light, and the office is cold and empty and seems much older than it is. Faintly I can still hear the music from downstairs, muffled and blending with the noise of the remaining guests, their babbling and bellowing laughter, distant rites of superficiality. As I approach the corner, the noise has died down almost completely. 

Suddenly I hear a moan. A man’s voice, the boss. It sounds raspy and sexual. The image of him engaged with some secretary impresses itself on my mind. Deeply repulsed I take a step back and press myself to the wall like a boy hiding from the monster of his subconscious. I am unsure how to proceed: disturb him in the act with all of the embarrassment and disgust it would entail or wait the matter out and have to listen to the whole ordeal? 

As I think these options over I hear the rustling of clothing and another moan, a man’s voice, not my boss. I glance around the corner.

The curtains are drawn shut, the room is lit by a single lamp on the enormous desk in the otherwise sparsely furnished room. There is my boss, tall blond guy, used to be Sturmabteilung, used to be built like a house, a real model Aryan, but the stress of the war, poor thing, made him fatten up and grey at the temples. He’s sitting on the edge of the desk, side towards me, leaning backwards and pressed to his body, held close by his big arms he’s got another man and he’s got his tongue in the man’s mouth. I don’t recognise the other guy, he’s a good head shorter than my boss and half his weight; Schutzstaffel too, but wearing field grey. He’s on tiptoes to make their bodies meet at the middle. They are grinding into each other, rustling uniforms, belts clicking, boots slipping and sliding. There isn’t an inch of space between them. I can’t see if they got their cocks out, I imagine they must have, judging by the noise the boss is making. He’s panting, almost whining, when the smaller one starts grinding into him with the rhythmic movements of copulation. 

“God, Horst, fuck, goddammit, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mumbles under his breath, losing control of his voice, slipping into dialect. 

He's leaning back now on his big arms, head thrown back, cheeks flushed, the posture of a smitten lady and Horst is pumping his hips into him. His long thin fingers squeeze between them, he's opening their flies. 

In an entirely out of place and rather comically timed observation I notice Horst's collar tabs and that Horst is far outranked by my boss just as the two men bring their cocks together. 

I know they can't see me in the darkness, so I watch them as if I was watching the breeding of a grotesquely mismatched pair of pedigree dogs, hardly believing that they are capable of mating, yet all the more fascinated by the disturbing sight. They rub their cocks together for a while, my boss making all sorts of undignified noise, and I, feeling the pressure in my pants, lazily rub myself through the front of my trousers. 

Suddenly my boss pushes Horst away in a gesture that I initially mistake for a panicked change of mind. For a moment Horst stands there on thin unsteady legs, deep shadows on his gaunt face, fully decorated uniform gleaming and a wet swollen cock peeking out of his breeches. Then the boss falls to his knees, scrambling forward with such haste you'd think Himmler himself was at his heels, only to bury his face in the other man's trousers and swallow his prick down to the base with a wet slurping sound that makes me worry that the contents of his swollen belly will come up again. 

But evidently he can take a dick. Horst holds him by the back of the head and pumps into his mouth while my boss, taking some special delight in this uncouth treatment, jerks himself off and very quickly spill all over the good carpet. He's still lazily milking his own cock when Horst finishes in his mouth. He gargles the spunk like mouthwash before swallowing it down.

I wait a moment for them to pull themselves back together to a halfway respectable state, or at least to tug their cocks back in, before I politely knock and waltz in with a knowing smirk, which only a couple weeks later earns me a much deserved promotion.


	29. The Favourite

It was long past school hours. The academy had fallen dark except for a few dim singular lights. They were alone in the teacher's office, the teacher and his favorite. 

“They don’t appreciate you like I do,” the old man, Obersturmbannführer by rank, whispered in the young cadet’s ear, dragging his tickling warm breath across the tightly cropped stubble on the back of his neck, deliberate, like a kiss. Hugging the young man from behind, he buried his nose in his stiffly combed back hair, drawing in the smell of pomade, cheap aftershave and just a lingering hint of nervous sweat. 

On the cadet’s breath there was the sour note of red wine. The alcohol made the young man just a little more slack in his arms and a little more hungry for touch and affection.

No, the old man did not really need that stuff to make him pliable. The boy adored him so much, he would do anything for him. But it did help with the minor hurdles along the way, getting past those ethical concerns, references to laws and punishments, unnatural barriers that could get in the way of a shared good time. 

The cadet giggled nervously when the teacher's heavy hands wandered down the front of his uniform, stroking the cheap thing as if it was as nice as his own, as if the unblemished body under it was as worthy of affection as the man's own old, scarred hide. He couldn’t find a fault with such a flattering approach by his most respectable superior. 

His cheeks became just a little redder when the old man said “don’t tell anyone you’re my favourite, you’ll make them jealous”. He did not object, and he pawed only weakly at the hand, which was slid under his waistband, and the rough fingers, which wrapped around his stiffening cock.

The teacher had only just started playing with the boy, lazily slacking him off, when he came, shuddering in his arms and breathlessly gasping his dear teacher's name. Quickly now, driven by his own hot need, he pulled down the cadet's trousers and shoved two sticky fingers in the boy's arse, who howled in surprise first, and then in pain. He struggled to get away from the old man, but despite all his budding strength, he was much too drunk to put up a fight, and there was no use calling for help, all alone in the dark office. So the teacher easily wrestled him to the ground, and got on top of him, holding him down by one arm twisted behind his back. All the while he was still finger fucking the boy, pushing the boy’s own spunk up his tight little arse, crudely working the hole open to stuff it again. He affectionately called the cadet by his first name and he called him strong and pretty and brave, whispering close by his ear, kissing his neck. Eventually the boy ceased fighting and he ceased his muffled complaints. The strong muscular body under him went slack, freeing the arm with which he had held him. 

When he unbuckled his own trousers the young man under him made no more attempts to escape. Taking his sweet time and rough pleasure he fucked the poor boy's puffy little hole. It hardly hurt him anymore, at least he did not complain, laying there flat on his stomach, sprawled out with his pants at his ankles and drooling on the floor, his eyes not fixed on anything, but staring vaguely in that direction of a solemn portrait on the wall.


	30. Force Feeding

_This Soviet camp had a very special prisoner in its care. An ace pilot like no other, a star of sorts, who had made for good covers. The little guy, who went by the name Erich or “Bubi” to his friends, had a pretty face and boyish innocence written across it. Blond and blue-eyed, sweet smiles and a viscous streak in his kill score, he was the perfect nazi poster boy. The Russians wanted to break him and own him, make him the poster boy of their very own take on a brighter future. He rejected their kind advances. Beatings made him only more determined. They locked him away all alone in constant dark or constant light. They tried everything. Now he was refusing food. He'd rather die than be theirs. They would not let it come to that._

They led their priced prisoner to a metal table with a white sheet on it. It laughed at him, the absolute pristine whiteness of it, clean and cynical like the rubber gloves the doctor wore, when she did it to him. She had brought three guards, all of them wearing their drab uniforms with white gowns over them. A comical sight had it not also been so daunting.

The humiliation came first, later the pain. The fat one held him by the legs, wrapped his big hands around Erich’s ankles and held him as still as a brace of metal would. The big one held his wrists by his side, pressed them down on the table as hard as he could and leaned on his hips, looming. Another one held his head and smiled a crooked smile down at him, a cruel parody of empathy. He was held down like the disobedient patient in a mental asylum. There was no need for all this. Erich could not fight even one of them off. Small men made for good pilots. Starvation did the rest. He was at the mercy of brutes.

On a small table by his side gleaming metal implements were laid out, scissors, syringes, bottles. And there was also the tube. The doctor took it and let it carefully run through her hands. He could see it from the corner of his eyes. It was red, with a funnel at one end, and it was much too thick.

They did not just want to feed him, they wanted to punish him. She would make it fit. 

At first it would not go through his nostrils, but she shoved and pushed. Then suddenly, with a ripping sound, it slid in and then it became easier, blood lubricating the rest of the way. 

Erich wanted to scream. His body went through the motions, clenching, pushing air, mouth wide open, but that foreign thing slid down his throat, blocking all sound except for his desperate wheezing for air. 

He could still cry. It came involuntary. Blood came gushing out of his nose each time the tube penetrated deeper, scratching and ripping. 

When it had finally reached his stomach Erich thought the worst was over. Then the doctor poured milk down the funnel. His head was already heavy with pain, a dizzying wet hot kind of pain, but the milk was cold and the sensation sharp. His chest burned. He could barely breathe. His vision became blurry. The sadistically smiling faces above were swallowed by their own shadows. The ceiling came closer. In the distance he heard doors opening and closing, the ticking of a clock, nearly as loud as the sound of the liquid fed down his throat. It sounded like litres were going down the tube, much more than his slight body could fit. He was sweating cold and trembling, from his fingers to his toes. He wasn’t resisting, but no longer in control of his body, yet the men leaning on him became heavier, the hands tightened around his limbs, he could not move at all, nor scream. He felt as if he was buried alive inside and out and they were much too close, crushing him. One of them laughed. 

“Good Russian milk for the little German boy,” said the doctor in her precise yet heavily accented German. She poured more and more of the cold liquid down the funnel.

The procedure lasted only a couple of minutes. 

When she pulled the tube out of him, she tore Erich’s oesophagus further. The milk that he threw up seconds later was mixed with his own blood. The men grinned wide in their stupid piglike joy. They’d have to do it again. Until he could keep it in. They wouldn’t let their famous prisoner die like an animal.


	31. Force Feeding II

lt took three attempts to break Erich. Then finally he lay perfectly still, like the body on the coroner’s table, his breath inaudible, his eyes glazed over, dazed and so very tired. His forehead was wet with sweat, strands of blond hair sticking to it, and his lips were crusted with milk and blood and puke. The guards were standing by, lined up like little school boys, as once again the doctor fed the tube down Erich’s throat. His gagging reflex broken, it slid over his sore flesh and down into his stomach. She poured milk into the funnel and removed the tube again. He was barely awake. The doctor looked at her watch and counted some minutes to ensure ingestion. Once she was satisfied by the amount of time passed, she nodded to her stout helpers.

“Very good, you sweet thing,” she said and squeezed Erich’s cheeks in a grandmotherly way, “that wasn’t so terrible now, was it?” And turning to the strongest guard, she ordered him to return the prisoner to his cell.

The big one, who didn’t look very bright, picked Erich up and like a young bride he carried the light body in his arms, down empty corridors, past iron doors and back to the little rebel’s cell. In that tiny room the light was electrical and harsh, there were no windows, and no bed, and they were alone now, the guard and the prisoner. The Russian laid Erich down on the floor. He closed the heavy door and returned to the prisoner, who remained collapsed as he had placed him, too weak to move of his own accord. He sat down, squatting next to Erich and patted him on the head with his big heavy hand.

“You’re very pretty,” he said in broken German, “very little and very pretty.”

Erich slowly opened his eyes. There was an expression of uncertainty and unease in them. He was terribly exhausted, but he dimly understood that something was wrong, he was nauseous and it was not just due to the previous ordeal and the liquid in his stomach.

The Russian’s hand was still on his forehead, caressing him with heavy strokes like a good dog. “Pretty blond boy,” he said and smiled down on him and then he grabbed Erich by the shoulders and turned him on his stomach and straddled him with his big thighs. Now Erich understood the nature of the situation. He groaned under the weight of the man, he made an attempt to escape, but he could not make his body move and his muscles twitched weakly.

The Russian pulled down the prisoner’s slacks, which were much too big on his tiny, starved frame. “Pretty boy, good boy,” he murmured. He ran his hands over the exposed skin, the curve of his buttocks and the soft, hairy skin between them. An unreasonable, disproportionate panic got hold of Erich, when he felt the probing fingers, but his numb body wouldn’t obey him and the fear ran wild in it, like electric current trapped within. Even speaking was terribly hard and he trembled with each word. “Please don’t,” he whispered, his voice coarse and breaking.

“Quiet,” the Russian said and he hit Erich on the back of the head so hard the sudden contact with the floor cracked one of his teeth and the taste of blood on his gums was fresh. As he lay panting and dizzy from the blow, the Russian unbuckled his own trousers. He was only half-hard and stroked himself to erection with one hand while his other proceeded to fondle Erich’s arse, squeezing the little fat that was left on it.

Erich could smell the pungent stench of his cock and then he felt it on his skin, thick and hot and slick with precum. For a moment he hoped that this would be enough to satisfy the guard, to just rub his need on him, to hump him a bit, a personal relief and gesture of humiliation, like pissing in his face. Then the man pulled him up by the hips and thrust into him.

Erich cried out. The Russian hit him again, like a misbehaving beast of burden.  


The small body wanted to resist his assault, it trembled, the limbs twitched, the mouth emitted low whines, but he broke him in, inch by inch, with cruel determination, somehow making it fit, stuffing Erich’s guts and tearing him open. He leaned over Erich’s shoulder, panting in his ear, embracing him, covering the small body whole, pressing him flat on the floor, like lovers.

“Bubi, you’re so tight,” he said breathlessly and, grunting like a pig, he slid his cock in him all the way.

Crushed and impaled and sick with pain, Erich threw up in spasms.

The Russian moaned in pleasure and kissed him wetly on the neck, whispering words of endearment for the pretty boy. And he fucked him hard and ruthless for some excruciating minutes. Afterwards he left the priced prisoner lying flat on his face in a puddle of sick, noticing with some pride that his come too was running out of the man. It didn’t occur to him to cover up his crime as he thought anyone who could come across the evidence would take his own share.


	32. The Final Perfomance

The Russians look down at the little propaganda minister, naked in the dirt. So many rough faces, square, dirty, not pretty no, but strong, healthy and so very cruel. How did these people do it, did the mothers smother their young when they came out deformed? Were the weak allowed to live only so long until eventually they were thrown down a well by their fitter brothers or chased away into the forest to be mauled by bears? They could have learned so much from them.

One of them steps forward, wide face, wide frame and many teeth. He must carry some noteworthy rank that he can’t recognise (but he does recognise that his wristwatch is of German make). He kicks the little doctor in the ribs, tells him to get up, first in Russian for his audience and then - oh, he is a man of intellect - also in impeccable German. He repeats the lines to the naked bundle cowering at his feet, curled up like a fussy little woman hiding her shame. It’s not his abused body, not the swollen, black and blue genitals Goebbels is hiding, it’s the foot. 

“Get up, good doctor, get up”, the man says, “we want to hear your lovely voice. Tell us one of your German fairy tales. Please, be so kind. We’ve come such a long way to get you. Tell us about the thousand year Reich and the superior man.” 

Goebbels must be hospitable. He tries his best to deliver his last speech with blood dripping from his toothless jaws. How they applaud him.


	33. Luger

“Maybe he can play dead,” says the heavyset major. He rips the Luger from the prisoner’s teeth and wipes the spit off it on the front of his trousers. Then he pulls a long magazine from one of the pockets of his tunic with a theatrically exaggerated gesture and holds both pistol and magazine up like a magician presenting rabbit and hat before performing his famous trick. He replaces the pistol’s empty magazine with the loaded one and then pulls back the striker to feed a bullet into the chamber. 

“Ah, beautiful German engineering!” he exclaims with a wink directed the captured German who is still kneeling at his feet. 

The other Americans chuckle. They suddenly fall silent when the major holds the pistol to the prisoner’s head. They hold their breath and the prisoner does too, looking down the end of the barrel. It all becomes very quiet, like that moment in the cinema when the lights go out. Despite years of service on two fronts it’s still frightening, the sight of that tiny black hole glaring at him, and knowing death was just a pull of the trigger, just a twitch of the finger away. Sometimes it’s easier to be a dog than a man. He bares his teeth and snarls. The major laughs, deep and jolly. 

“Well I’m afraid that is a trick he can do only once and wouldn’t that be a waste?” 

His men exchange murmurs of approval. 

“But there is one other trick he’s very good at, very good indeed. And I didn’t even need to teach him!” 

He lowers the barrel of the gun to the prisoner’s lips. 

“Suck it.”


	34. Sturmabteilung Sleaze

What a lovely lad this young street brawler was, proportioned like a young god. The way flesh and labour had made him was further flattered by those tall laced boots and the tight cinch of his belt (the soft skin of his belly was sore under it, thin fur growing out of red roots). Although he’d never had a horse’s back between his big thighs his breeches were cut like those for riding, hugging his knees, bold in shape and so provocatively tight on his lovely firm ass. And although he was quite a bit taller than Ernst, that lad somehow always managed to look up to him. All those things could be ignored as mere vanity or naive splendour, unaware of any seedy implications, but the way he kept on running his fingers through his blond hair, sculpting it back in shape, and then by the end, always ever so slightly grabbing a full shock of it - _you want me to pull on it, don’t you?_

Ernst bought him a beer and another and three hours later they were sitting in his living room, boots on the carpet and the smell of their intoxication drenching the homely wallpaper. The lad sat on the couch with his legs spread wide, bent forward, elbows on his knees and hands on his chin, listening intently as Ernst played Wagner for him on the piano. It was of course something grand and boisterous, it would have to be for a lad like this. A chorus of men’s voices resonated in each note, and although they sang to God’s glory or such banality to the lad it was a cupboard’s street brawl and he dreamed with hot tears in his eyes of boots hitting the ground and cracking skulls. And rather undignified given the great master’s presence in the room, he stroked his cock through the fabric of his trousers, staining them too. 

For the benefit of his neighbours, who didn’t enjoy a young man’s moans quite as much as he did, Ernst put on a record, Wagner, of course. With some jest to it he made the lad bend over the piano and took it on himself to pull down those very flattering breeches as far as the tall boots allowed. The lad’s ass was quite a handful and covered in soft blond fuzz, like an overripe peach. Erich went down on his knees, spread his cheeks and ran his tongue over the tightly clenched hole, grimmy taste of sweat tickling on the tip of it.

The lad jerked away in surprise and then, changing his mind, pushed his ass back into Ernst’s face with a deep delighted groan. 

Ernst ate him out for a decadent amount of time. The spit was dripping down his chin. The lad's hole was a wet quivering cunt and the lad started begging - literally, verbally begging Ernst to fuck him in the ass, _please, god, please_ , in as many words as he could get over his lips without choking on them. Ernst drew it out with a kindly sadistic pleasure. He pushed his tongue up the lad’s ass. He probed him with one measly finger, teasing shallow little jabs, always sniffing, kissing, biting the back of his neck, just to see how desperate the pleading would get before he grabbed him by his pretty blond hair, pulling so hard the lad twisted and squaled, and then he stuffed his stout cock in him all the way with one utterly satisfying stroke. The delightful young man almost groaned louder at the sound of Ernst ’s belly slapping on his buttocks, and the terrible wet squelching of his loose hole than the actual feeling of cock pounding his guts. Either way he quickly shot his spunk all over the shiny black surface of the piano.


	35. Le Premier Amour

They had told her the Germans were barbarians, huns, horrible monsters, ugly inside and outside, but the young officer she found in her father’s stable (stroking her favourite horse’s nose as if it was his own steed) was anything but that. In contrast to that sternly grey uniform he looked so young and so gentle. Dark hair, a faint smile on his lips, the depth of his blue eyes. A ray of sun from the window that fell on his face made it look like he was the subject of an angelic revelation. Only the intensity of the gaze he directed at her gave her goosebumps. No man had ever looked at her like that. There was something dangerous about it. Even a delicate ornamented dagger still had a blade and any blade could cut.

He had noticed how nervous she was when he put his hand on hers (how could a soldier have hands that soft?) and stepped closer, closing the distance between them, breaching that space that was socially acceptable for strangers to keep. The shiny tips of his big boots nearly touched her shoes. They were so close. He spoke to her encouragingly, in soft words; French, and German too, because although she did not understand it, he saw that she liked that, not knowing what he said, just looking at him, caught by his eyes like a pretty bird in a delicate net. She wanted to see more of him, take off that uniform, see him, touch him, feel his body against hers. And he waited patiently for her to lean in for a kiss.

He was big, much bigger than she had thought from his slender frame, jarring really how fat and heavy his member lay on his stomach, pink on white. Bits of the straw they were lying on already clung to his skin. His gorgeous body was finally for her to see, yet she couldn’t help but feel fear welling up when he directed her hand to his genital, to make her feel the weight of it and how very much he wanted her. 

Suddenly she remembered what the others had said on the market square, when the Germans first came marching in. They were conquerors after all, not terribly brutal ones, polite neighbours, but conquerors nevertheless. It was only fair if it would hurt her a little - and hurt her it did, despite how wet she was for him. She bled when he pushed into her, slowly, very slowly, coaxing her body into submission, while he kissed her neck and pressed his hand on her mouth so her parents wouldn’t hear her cries.


	36. Pilfered Goods

They called him Ivan, but it was not his name. They called him Ivan, because it amused him, the irony of it, to hear his Germans stutter that name they had chosen as surrogate for all of their hated enemies from the east, those Mongolian hordes. To hear them say _Ivan, Ivan_ with desperate affection. Begging Ivan not to be terrible, begging him to please be merciful and please be kind and _god, please_ don’t send them to Russia, anything but that.

He kept them in the vast basement of a nice little villa he had seized for the duration of his stay in Berlin. Two or three of them in each room, they needed some company after all when he was gone for the day. He was no monster, he took good care of his boys, especially the young ones in their little shorts. How droll and pretty they were. They were the first to get wool blankets, mattresses and pots. He brought the sweet boys big cups of warm milk and pieces of chocolate every time he came to play with them. 

He did feed his pets well, better than any of their comrades outside, who were fighting over scraps of food like wild dogs. By comparison it was a comfortable life, he thought. They lived more like their young wives and sisters, who made pretty eyes at their liberators on the streets, and that was a luxury for men, who should rightfully be in Siberia, providing food for mother Russia.

He had quite a zoo assembled in those cold cells. Besides the Berlin boys there were two East Prussian men of the SS, brothers that looked like twins. He could make them do all sorts of fun things to each other. Together with them he kept a scrawny young officer of the same company, who looked at the wall and covered his ears, when he hurt them. Then he also had three jolly Bavarians, Gebirgsjäger who were brown like Italians. A tall Swede with hair almost as white as his skin and deep-set blue eyes (no doubt an eager volunteer with those splendid racial assets). A man from Alsace with long brown eyelashes who was good with his tongue but wept at an annoying frequency. And his personal favourite: a stern and bitter old officer with a crooked nose who had once - before Ivan took them for keepsake - worn nearly as many medals on his tunic as he had fencing scars on his cheek.

But all good things must come to an end, he had to return to Moscow. His harem had to be disbanded. The young ones he let go first and they ran away into the ruins of their city like little mice. Most of the other Germans he had sent to the Siberian camps. One man from Hamburg who had been blinded by a grenade he brought to the train station, so he would find his way back home. The Alsatian he gifted to a good friend in the French occupation zone. Before he had decided what to do with the Swede that one had managed to slit his wrists and bled out down the drainage. The arrogant old man he took along to Moscow, where on a crowded red square they hanged him for war crimes.


	37. Stauffenberg

He looked at himself in the mirror, naked, his bandages removed, standing in the pile of his dress uniform. His wife stood behind him in her light nightgown. She had her head on his shoulder, one slender arm around his stomach and the index finger of her left hand gently pressed to his empty eye socket, more so pointing out the flaw than hiding it, the tip of her finger dipping into the hollow space.  
“Have you been crying again?” she asked as she ran her finger over his dark eyelashes and pressed on the reddened skin of his eyelids with the sharp edge of her nail.  
Shamefacedly he turned away from his reflection and pressed his lips to her forehead in a plea for forgiveness.


	38. The Good Adjutant

Werner was a bit like a school boy who threw little paper balls at girls he liked. On one of them he’d write _I love you_ , you simply had to pick up the right one. It was just boyish incompetence in expressing his feelings, he was essentially good at heart, obedient and kind and he had to be just like that. As adjutant he was his officer's shadow by day and his officer's bedmate by night. And he was a sweet, innocent bedmate. Once he'd been given permission, he drew his officer’s smaller body to his chest and held him so tight. 

And he never did follow up on his arousal in those moments, fearing if he tried to touch him indecently his superior would swat his hand away and he wouldn’t ever get to hold him again. 

So it came a surprise when one of these nights his dearest officer grabbed his hand, put it down the front of his trousers, and pressed his palm on the hard bulge of his cock telling him in a tone not unlike a command - but his command weren’t usually sharply spoken unless they needed to be - to take care of that, _now_. He did it, gladly, slacking him off and sucking up every quiet moan and stilted breath he was given in return.

Unspeakable things were better conveyed by acts than words. One of the following nights his officer grabbed Werner by the scruff of the neck. He pulled him down on his crotch rubbing his face over the front of his trousers, until he was hard and Werner could feel it, feel the cock pulsing through the fabric, all that bottled up desire. He made sounds like a young dog, begging with scratching fingernails to get him out of his trousers.

He had evidently not fully understood what his place and duty would be. When he was finally given permission (he pulled down the trousers and the erection sprung up, the pink head wet on his lips), he suddenly was no longer quite so bold. He placed kisses up and down the length of his cock and on his belly and on his thighs and when he let his tongue dart out it was only a shyly grazing touch.

 _Do it right_ , his officer told him with a slap on his cheek. It was only a gentle slap, but there was something about the way Werner apologetically smiled up at him (the expression certainly benefiting from the cock across his face), that made him hit Werner again, and harder this time. Like a good servant Werner only smiled wider, as he was hit again and again, until his cheeks were swollen red and tears welled up in his eyes. They ran down his abused cheeks when his officer pushed his fingers into his mouth, shoved his slender hand in as far as it would go, and two ringed fingers down his throat. He did not dare bite. His officer proceeded to shove the fingers in and out, fucking his throat. There were murmurs of approval when Werner managed to calm the retching and twitching of it and disappointed sighs and brutal jabs when he did not. This was repeated until he had learned to hold still and not to gag and he was only choking on his own thick drool, so much of it, spilling over his lips and running down his pink face. Then his officer pulled him on his cock making gross use of his sore throat.

He used him many more nights and taught him many other tricks until one day the bright young man was taken away from him as so many promising young men before and after.


	39. Liebe geht durch den Magen

She fed him well on her mother’s and mother's mother's cooking - all the good German food. Potatoes and pork, swimming in butter, roast meat, thick sauces and pastry, chocolate and pie - _don’t forget the cream, dear, and the sweet milk for your coffee and do take another slice, I don’t want to throw a thing away_. She watched as he began to grow, to swell. Soon he was too big for his uniform, so they opened up the darts and that made a little more room and the uniform didn’t look sharp any longer but he looked happy, her plump little husband. Eventually even that wasn’t enough and new clothing had to be made to fit his Rubenesque shape. Twice the fabric consumed, and new boots for his fat thighs. How he was sweating to get up the stairs now, sweating even in gentle spring sun (the heavy black fabric certainly contributing too). His face was strawberry red all day long as he sat at his desk and breathed heavily, crushed by his own weight. _Oh, dear, my dear, don’t talk about the war now, you’re entirely unfit for services. Don’t be silly. Who will make your favourite cake then and who will cut your steak, no, you stay with me, you helpless little thing._


	40. Fest der Schönheit

With calculated words and jolly smiles the director coaxes the pretty officer out of his uniform, each promise (to be a model, a movie star, fame, money and duty, duty to the arts, the German people) a button unbuttoned. Rewards drip from a forked tongue trickle down the young man’s bare chest and collect as gold dust on the dark hair leading down his pelvis.

No, I must see it all, I politely insist, every scar, every inch, no need to be shy.

Now the man is lying on the couch entirely nude, white skin clinging to red leather, with his hands crossed on his chest and his head thrown back as if he was suffering from great torment and it’s a good image, classical, one must admit with a pang of jealousy and reach for the camera.


	41. Davon geht die Welt nicht unter

A hand mindlessly placed on the top of Erhard’s thigh where it connects to the hip, touching him as if it was nothing, not any different from any other caress, just like the hair tousling, the pats on his shoulder or the way Hans strokes his chest: oh so brotherly and chaste. He holds his breath, seconds pass, the hand becomes hotter, heavier, now Hans must feel his pulse as loud as Erhard hears it in his own ears. 

“Do you miss her?,” Hans asks as his fingers absent-mindedly wander, step by step down the Apollo’s belt and he doesn’t look at Erhard, not in his eyes, not anywhere, and he is humming a Zarah Leander hit about love as he strokes Erhard to orgasm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no homo


	42. Test Subject

How much they suffer, the poor little things, those miserable starved creatures who stare at him with their bulging wet eyes, and in those dark ponds he sees his own reflection: a kind smile, a white coat and so much life in him, they’d eat him whole if they could, rip their saviour to pieces, those nasty crows. He picks one out of the flock (or is it a murder now, or a swarm or a plague?) and it musters a wide smile showing him its rotting teeth up to the pale gums. When the female is tied to the operating table - for her own good - she still smiles nervously and he smiles back at her full of benevolence and so very selflessly he takes off one rubber glove to put a hand on her filthy cheek, stroking her gently as he pushes the long needle of a syringe into her chest and she stares at him, suddenly terrified, the eyes all white sclera and black pupil. She realizes only then, as the syringe is already feeding acid into her heart, in what form salvation will come to her today.


	43. In the Close Company of Men

They don’t tell you what it smells like on a U-boat, that specific mix of oil and sweat, of damp wool and grease and man - disgusting really but you do get used to it if you’re cut out for the service and not some squeamish pretty boy better suited to fly a plane. There is no room for introverts, you’re never alone and always too close, much too close. Squeeze past a man sitting on his bunk and you know from the way his hand brushes yours and from the smell of prick that you disturbed him in the middle of his wank. You’re already packed like sardines in a tin yet still there is always someone who wants you closer, who doesn’t mind the way you reek when you do mind that he’s hairy like a bear and his balls haven’t seen light nor water for a week. You come to feel dirty through and through, longing for nothing more than a bath all by yourself, but once you’re out of it all, on shore leave, when you’ve had your bath and your shave and you have thoroughly enjoyed the company of women in clean white dresses with golden skin and soft little fingers you do get a little homesick and you have to admit to yourself that something is missing, too much freedom and fresh air can deprive a man.


	44. Smoke Break

Two boots are resting on your shoulder, crossed at the ankle. Pilot’s boots, long and sleek, the black leather polished to a shine, perfectly shaped and fitted. They end just under the knee, an unnatural straight line up to the arch of the breeches that you dare not look up to lest your eyes give away too much.

He smirks when he notices how you’re looking at them - just a quick, needy glance - and he does you a favour, presses one sole to your cheek, tilting your head backwards (now you do look up at him wide-eyed). With a smile, but not an inch of leeway to refuse he says, “Go on then, lick them.” 

You hardly dare to touch him but you have to, the way he’s using you as a footrest. You carefully hold one boot up in your sweating fingers while you run your tongue along the heel and the shaft, leaving the bitter taste of shoe polish in your mouth. You hope that he would also notice that you want to be stepped on and kicked and thoroughly abused, but he is just flipping through a magazine with pictures of pretty ladies and dashing pilots, and then he is laughing at a funny propaganda piece.


	45. Kolibri

Himmler loses his glasses somewhere in the process of being pushed to the ground face first with Röhm’s fat hands around his neck. The bathroom disappears, the closed door, the stalls and urinals disappear, only the cold tiles of the floor remain, his face pressed into them as he collapses under the crushing weight of Röhm’s huge body. Now for lack of other distractions the smell of the man, breathing on his cheek, stinking of sweat and beer and cheap aftershave, is more unbearable than ever.

Very softly, without a hint of brutality, all the more menacing for it, Röhm says, “You’ve been wondering about it, haven’t you? Wondering what it would feel like, you on all fours and a nice fat prick up your arse.” He leans in closer and Himmler feels his cock then, the bulge of it pressing between his buttocks, hard and huge and terrifying, and he forgets to breathe for a moment, the thought of what Röhm could do to him running wild in his head, every outcome of it with him filthy, humiliated and crawling back for more.

“I can take it slow if you want me to, Heinrich, I can make it feel good”, Röhm says and with one hand he is stroking Himmler’s cheeks, gently like he’s one of his boys, and with the other unbuttoning his own pants, slowly, taking pleasure in the way every button opened makes the man under him hold his breath. “But you don’t want that, do you? You want to be defiled, debased, violated.” And under him Himmler winces at every word. Now he’s pale as a corpse and Röhm is no longer on top of him, he’s standing over him, lazily stroking his cock. Himmler doesn’t move, doesn’t try to get away, and Röhm ejaculates on his back and leaves him lying there, waiting.


	46. The Sweet Embrace of Comrades

It was cold outside, not Moscow cold, or Siberia cold but Aachen cold, which was still cold enough when you slept out at night and had only the clothing on your body. A Landser uniform, worn and probably died in before, the holes fixed again, the whole ensemble still too big for his teenage body. Shoes reappropriated from the corpse of an American found by the side of the road and earmuffs from his mother, stuffed under his cap because it too was too big anyway. When they were lucky, they found for the night not just a hole in the ground, a crater or a trench, but an abandoned home or at least a barn. No fires, of course, so they had only each other for warmth. Each man or not quite man picked himself a mate for the night to share a blanket with and that wasn’t all that bad, not the worst of the war. More like a sliver of home found in the close embrace and sometimes, he didn’t mind, also in hot breath on his neck and fumbling hands under the covers.


	47. Best Friends

It requires only a look, the intense fixation of hunger, and a cheeky smile in the corner of his mouth and without words he knows to follow his friend away from the other men. Behind the latrine he is grabbed by the scruff of the neck and pushed down on all fours; trousers at his ankles and a bit of spit easing the way for a quick relief. The initial pain he is used to, he got better with time, but he can’t bear the smell of cock and old sweat and urine and his own shit. Back in the garden the men laugh as if they could see him now. He winces and his friend comes with a stifled grunt and collapses on his back, breathing heavy and hot on his cheek. He must wait a while and then he will get up and leave him and then he can wipe the filth off his arse, fix his uniform and his hair and with some delay return with a wide smile for another round of beers.


	48. The Good Soldier

He is looking at a map, gloved fingers holding firmly onto it, so that biting cold wind can’t tear it out of his hands. He’s got his head drawn deep into the collar of his leather coat, worn out body hiding under those cracked folds that look like the remains of a starved animal. He has no idea where we are, no one does. The sky is a cacophony of detonations and fire and all of us, whatever is left of us, just need to get out - but where to? The front is moving fast. We all look to him, hoping he will lead us to safety, equally willing to follow him into certain death.

There is an American on the side of the road. Plump, brown and half frozen to death. He’s got no coat, his fingers are blue and he doesn’t speak at all. He won’t even try to talk to him. He’s still looking at that map. He throws just one quick glance at the American. I’m close enough to see the change in his expression, for the fraction of a second there is disgust in his eyes, so familiar it makes my stomach churn. Then it seems like he looks through the prisoner, so endlessly bored, and back to the map. No command, no comment. His silence grows louder, it muffles my ears, almost swallows the rumble of artillery in the distance. I know what he wants me to do. He’s not even studying the map, just looking at a single point on it, thinking maybe, as he waits for me to remove the nuisance and finally get rid of the man.

I lead the American a few steps away to the wall of a bombed out building, not out of sight or hearing distance, just far enough that no stray bullet can hit one of our men. The American doesn’t understand what’s going on, he looks at that wall and back to me and back to the wall. I drive a bullet through his head and he instantly drops down like a wet sack.

He hands me a handkerchief to clean the blood and other, grislier residue off my hands. I keep it, because he doesn’t demand it back. It’s white with a blue line around the edges and his name embroidered in one corner.

It smells like I imagine he smells, gasoline, old leather and the faint hint of women’s perfume. It’s probably just the pocket of the coat it’s been in, probably just that he used it before to wipe some spilled liquid, but the smell becomes inseparable from him in my head and the note of blood I added to it too.

He despises my love for him, but he doesn’t reject it. He gives me small gifts. That handkerchief, a piece of chocolate, a dazed smile when the high hits him, a firm hand on my shoulder, a pat on my back, concerned questions about the condition of my hand and that awful fracture, bruises, hurts, wounds, everything I take for him, everything I do. But he's so moody, all smiles one moment and his boot on the back of my neck the next, hissing at me through clenched teeth, how I could dare to look at him like that, calling me vile and disgusting, when I squirm and twist to taste the sole of his boots and I say _yes_ and sorry, sir and I think about how he could have me shot or hung or worse for having these thoughts. More terrifying than the fear for my life is knowing that he is right and I do deserve it.

In the end dreams and reality become hard to separate. It’s all one, my depraved desires, little thoughts in the back of my head, the taste of his skin, the hardness of his body and the cold of his eyes; having him or being had; things half experienced, half imagined. One of these nights I find myself kneeling and begging at his feet and how kind of him, he allows me to rub my face on the front of his trousers and lick the coarse wool of it, as I pull myself off with freezing fingers. Clumsily because my dick is only halfway peeled out of my uniform and every touch is a painful burning sensation. Utterly degrading, what a fitting end. I don’t get a single drop on him, but I faintly wish I had, so the stain could serve as a sign later to discern memory from fantasy.


	49. A Turn of the Clock

The worst thing about prison is that it’s so damn boring. Everything is well organized, clean and safe. The walls are white. The bars are smooth. There are no laces on my shoes. I eat my food with plastic spoons. When they want me to see the sun they walk me like a dog on a leash. I don’t understand how they think they can fix me this way. It’s hardly a punishment. Mopping the floor, dusting books and cleaning toilets isn’t even half as effective as being strapped to a post and beaten to unconsciousness.

I spend hours laying on my bunk with my arms crossed behind my back humming to myself, thinking these funny little things. The problem with being left alone with your thoughts is that once you have thought them, you think of something else and whatever you were thinking about before just disappears and with nothing new ever happening you end up thinking the same thoughts over and over again like the hands on a clock going round and round.

At 1 o’clock there is the birthday party, jugs of foaming beer, sweet schnapps and plates overflowing with pork and potatoes.

At 3 o’clock I slip and fall off that damn roof and break my legs into two dozen pieces and the pain is so damn bad I can feel it to this day - every morning when I wake up and I just want to drag myself over to the toilet and throw up.

At 4 o’clock the tanks come rolling in with a deep rumbling in my stomach. In the distance the artillery plays us the last concert and planes fly like a murder of crows when it turns night.

At 8 o’clock I remember what the Americans told me about the camps. I imagine a naked little thing torn to pieces by a pack of dogs as the black-clad guards watch laughing. The dogs come running back to their masters, tails wagging and snouts full of blood. A tongue darts out between the reddened teeth and licks its master’s hand. Good boys.

At 9 o’clock it’s piles of corpses with their hands still held high over their heads.

At 10 o’clock it’s the crackling of burning straw.

At 11 o’clock it’s me and him in a filthy kitchen with a woman of no good stock between us. She says something and I only understand the familiar “nemec, nemec“. She smiles and pushes him away from her and then she’s on the table and she doesn’t smile anymore. Somewhere in the corner a cat cries, or a child. She doesn’t even wear anything under her skirt. The smell of her cunt is so strong I would eat her out if she wasn’t such a stubborn thing. I tell him to fuck her. He looks like he doesn’t want to, but with my hand around his dick and a few quick strokes he’s hard and willing enough. She doesn’t even fight back when he thrusts into her. They are used to this sort of thing here. I watch his dick go in and out of her. Flesh rubbing on flesh, clinging together in a twitching embrace.

At 12 o’clock the come is leaking out of her onto the wooden table, dripping on the dirt floor below like spilled milk and I laugh and say to him we should find her kid to lick it up. That smile. He always knows what I want. He sits down between the legs dangling off the table, opens his mouth wide like at the doctor’s and stretches out his tongue. A single, milky drop falls onto it. He swallows the bitter pill and looks at me for approval. I’m so happy, I must look like a little child. “More,” I say quietly. He hates it. That vile taste. But he laps it all up, mine and his come, the thick mix that’s oozing from her cunt like pus. He sucks it off her folds and swallows it down coughing.

It’s 1 o’clock again at the damn party. I wink at him, stretch out my tongue and dip it into the foam of his beer. It just keeps going round and round.


	50. Letter from Malmedy

Dear William,

Thank you for the photos attached to your latest letter, they really brightened my day.

As for your question about the events at Malmedy and whether I had been abused in a similar manner as you have heard from other prisoners’ testimonies. You have asked me before and I had previously construed the question as simple curiosity in a matter of some public debate, but I’ve now come to understand that you have asked out of genuine concern for my well being. I have decided to tell you the truth as you’ve been a good friend to me. I don’t want to lie to you and I don't like being evasive. I trust that you will keep the matter entirely to yourself as I have no intentions of bringing my experience to public attention.

Rest assured that none of the things that were inflicted on me could compare to the horrors I have witnessed on the Eastern front. I have seen with my own eyes the disgusting things the Russians will do to surrendered soldiers of the Schutzstaffel. We found corpses of German soldiers which were used for target practice, violated with knives, gutted like pigs or burned alive. You have seen yourself what happened to the German girls who were unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the Red Army. Many Americans had no manners but they also had no malice.

Generally speaking the behaviour towards me from the investigators, especially Mr. Ellis - and even the Jewish prosecutors, was fair. They did not beat me during interrogations or ever threatened to do so. Their weapons were purely verbal. They tried to undermine my character with trickery and lies. Some of these performances were at the expense of my subordinates, who had to serve as actors in their plays. They were made to accuse me, beg me to lie or were simply displayed to me so I could see how low they had sunken at the hands of their torturers.

There was one incident of assault however, which I will describe to you in as much detail as I can recall. I will leave it to you to decide if you want to proceed reading. Read it all or none of it, it makes no difference to me. I don't expect condolences.

One day in early January my prison cell was opened and four guards entered. This was at a time when I had been moved to a more remote but also much more comfortable hospital cell. Usually one person would suffice to transport a prisoner to their interrogation cell. Another one might also come along to pick up a second prisoner, who would then be interrogated in the same or a nearby room. They did however carry with them at least one of the black hoods, which we were always made to wear on our way to the interrogation rooms. From some experience I assumed this would be another one of those madhouse interrogations, where I would now be made to see more of my former comrades. But I quickly learned the guards had other plans. I say plans, because whether the things they did to me were by order or by their own volition I can not tell, but the enjoyment they took in their actions suggested to me it was the latter.

I should mention that I had seen these guards before and they had always acted very harshly towards me, kicking me as I crossed the prison courtyard on the way to the interrogation room, shoving me up and down stairs and making liberal use of their batons. I believed them to be Slavic, maybe Polish from their looks and their accented German.

I followed the usual procedure of standing with my face to the wall and my hands behind my back in case they wanted to restrain me as the weaker guards sometimes did. I heard them walk into the cell and close the door behind them. One of them fastened the hood over my head. It reeked of blood. I can confirm this much from the other inmate’s accusations. The man then removed the belt from his pants and tied it around my wrists, which you can imagine was absolutely not standard procedure.

Having restrained me in such a manner, he grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me on the cell floor. I managed to turn on my side so that at least my face didn’t make contact with the concrete. They insulted me in broken German. They called me a pig, a dog and a degenerate. The irony made me chuckle, which enraged them more. One of them with a nasal voice, I believe he must have been the ringleader, said they would teach me humility. I refrained from telling them that any barbaric behaviour would have the opposite effect on me.

Nonetheless they weren’t satisfied with just verbal abuse. While taunting me further for not dying a warrior’s death, having been captured, not having followed my Führer, being at the mercy of them and the Americans and so forth they also started to kick me. First hesitantly as if they were testing the thickness of my skin, but soon hard enough to drive the air out of my lungs. Being restrained, blinded, surrounded and in increasingly more pain I had no way of protecting myself.  
One kicked me in the stomach with enough force to make me throw up. They proceeded to kick and pummel me. Lying on my back I was unable to rid myself of the spit in my throat. The matter was worsened by the wet hood clinging to my face. I choked on my own vomit, wheezed for air and struggled to remain conscious. After excruciatingly long seconds I found myself turned on my belly and the hood pulled off my head. I could clean my throat and breathe again. I was panting for breath, dazed and disoriented. Although my body would later turn red and blue and black I felt no more pain, just a numb warmth swelling under my skin.

With the hood removed I could now get a better look at the men staring down on me. In their expressions there was no reason, hate or anger, just pure delight in the destruction of others. I can always tell a sadist by that glimmer in his eyes, the redness of his cheeks, the shortness of breath. I realised the gravity of my situation.

Two of them pulled me up by the arms into a kneeling position. The one with the nasal voice grabbed me by the hair and shoved my face into his crotch. He suggested he'd make you choke on something else, which elicited some dirty laughter from the other men. He asked me whether I was going to be in his words a “good Nazi boy”. As I didn’t reply he slapped me across the face and asked again. This was repeated several times, but a slap wouldn’t make me budge.

I told him quite calmly that I was not afraid. This was partially true. At this point I considered myself a dead man walking, with a noose around my neck. My only concern was preserving my honour, that is to endure to my end with the dignity becoming of a Prussian officer. You will not be able to understand this, but in a way the struggle was thrilling to me. The memory of the battlefield still lingered with me; a wild hunt through the night, the low humming of bombers overhead, a firework of muzzle flashes and screams. I’m not made for a comfortable life. The boredom was eating at my core.

The ringleader called me an “arrogant cocksucker” and said something to the others in Polish. To me he said: “Don’t try anything funny”. Despite centuries of Prussian occupation the Poles evidently had very little understanding of German dignity. One of the others, the heavy one who had previously tied my hands, undid his belt and freed my hands. He grabbed my tunic, trying clumsily to get it off my body. I took the matter into my own hands. I only had the clothing I wore on my body and did not intend to get any of their filth on it. Watching me put the clothing carefully under my bed seemed to amuse them. They burst into laughter and called me “kurwa”, whore.

I had to strip naked. They grabbed me by the arms, one man each, and pushed me face first on the bed. They spread my arms, each man pressing down on it with his body weight, so that I was bent over the bed and barely able to move. The heavy one stepped forward and hit me across the back with his belt.  
Flogging is a matter entirely different from beating. There are only so many kicks or punches a body can take before it breaks irreparably, but you can whip a man for hours and only break his soul. It’s a completely different pain too. You will not grow numb, you won’t get used to it. Every hit cuts like a blade and rends you deep inside. The pain doesn’t fade, every hit with the belt just pushes the blade deeper into you. 

I counted the hits until my brain stopped functioning. Everything turned white. I’m counting confirmed kills, prisoners, horses, gallons, miles. I’m being carried by now dead comrades, my back is dotted with shrapnel. I lie in the charred remains of my Tiger tank, my back is covered in burning oil. The blade has cut every nerve in my body. My thoughts turn red and then only black.

The next thing I remember is lying curled up on the bed, my back warm with blood. I was too weak to raise my body off the mattress. Still the flogging wasn’t enough to satisfy them. They took turns sodomising me. It was less painful than the belt. 

They became angry at my lack of anguish and tried find ways to humiliate me. One of them rubbed his filth in the wounds on my back. Another pushed it down my throat. They choked me with the belt. I thought of my brother Hasso who had come to me to cry his eyes out when something similar but less damaging had happened to him. I liked him, but he was too weak. I didn’t cry.

Once they had gotten their sexual gratification, the guards left me. I don’t think anyone was aware of what they had done to me. The doctors didn’t work at that time of the day. Four hours latter a nurse returned to duty. She patched me up and didn’t ask questions.

My dear Sigurd knows of course and now do you. I expect neither pity nor sympathy.

I would like to talk to you about more joyful matters like the wonderful weather or the start of the hunting season but I have run out of paper. You know I try to avoid going to the shops, we are always short on the necessities here.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.


	51. calamari a la fascismo

Himmler was utterly plain and normal, an ordinary blend of small town police officer and school teacher, friendly, strict and a little neurotic in just the way that it was acceptable, maybe even called for, to be neurotic when one carried so much responsibility.

To his adjutant it was reassuring at first, how mundane he was, even his ugliness and unimpressive stature adding to the impression of the man as office and duty rather than an autonomous agent. It became worrying later, with schedules and appointments out of the picture, in the private moments, in quiet offices that smelled of disinfectant, on the long rides to strange places, in the back seats of cars loud enough for all the privacy if one just whispered quietly enough, and in grey hotel rooms and in the infinite span between dusk and dawn. 

But then it was too late to escape his grasp and his young adjutant found himself trapped by things mundane, like contracts and obligations and expectations, and otherworldly too, dark secrets left best unspoken, old rituals and lost artifacts and things that came crawling out of a deep darkness that had never seen a single star. 

At night his captor came quietly as if he was invited into his bed. He spoke to him with a familiar voice and touched him with familiar hands and touched him also with unfamiliar parts like he’d seen only in books and museums on creatures of the sea; long tentacles, not wet but smooth like snake skin, except for the suckers on them with their many teeth. Cephalopod arms that slid over his body and under his nightshirt as he lay there frozen and mortified, mortified not by the terrible organs but the man that they belonged to, that very plain man at the centre of all these horrors.

Himmler talked to him like a father to his son. He held him tight in his arms, only to calm and comfort him as the tentacles slid up his legs like snakes seeking warmth, slid around his thighs and his abdomen and touched his limp sex briefly, disinterested.   
They weren’t content with just touching him from the outside and sought entry into his body, sliding between his legs, thick as ship ropes. First the thin ends prodded at his anus, two or three or four, like the small fingers of curious children. They weren’t wet like one would imagine them to be and it wouldn’t have made any difference. When they first broke into him they stretched him so wide it tore his sphincter and it ripped the skin of his perineum to his balls, clean and quickly, as if it had been snipped with scissors.  
One or two or three, he couldn’t tell, pushed deep into his guts, penetrated far too deep and then deeper still, not inches deep but feet, so deep he’d would have thought that they might come out of the other end soon, if he had had the mind to think and do anything at all but feel the mind numbing pain and that heavy weight inside him, moving like many creatures, wiggling, and the pressure of it, like being slowly lowered onto a stake. 

Other arms came sliding up his heaving chest and caressed his mouth that stood wide open from the pain of it all, breathlessly gasping beyond screams. Himmler kissed him on his quivering lower lip, intimate but without lust. One tentacle slid inside his mouth and down his throat. The invasion was so brutal he couldn’t even gag.   
He thought he would die then, suffocate on the limb, and it was a relief to know that the torment would end. In that moment the tentacles pumped their seed inside of him, twitching for many long seconds. They ejaculated into his arse, his guts, his throat and into his stomach. It was too much for his body to keep, gallons of sticky, bitter, thick ejaculate were pumped into him. It was so much it filled his stomach to the top. He didn’t even throw up, it just spilled over and it came running out of his mouth, and his nose and his arse and he was covered in it inside and outside, like a crying newborn in its afterbirth. 

Worse than the pain and the filth was the way Himmler whispered to him all throughout it, about a new Germany and new soldiers, new men. He solemnly swore that he would breed him again and again, each night until they would make that new man together, his good soldier, his favourite womb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, we are being very serious here about tentacle rape.


	52. Red Honey Dribble

On the day of the last advance I found the Standartenführer curled up all alone in the back of his Kübelwagen. He had fallen asleep fully clothed. It was his habit. The hat with the death’s head was still set at exactly the same angle as always, showing some of his light brown hair, which was now dark and greasy with pomade and sweat. His wrinkled leather coat clung to his body like a macabre nightgown fit for a butcher. His gloved hands were holding on to his binoculars in the tight grip I had seen so often on men killed in the moment of action. Maybe they were of use in the dreams that nervously fluttered behind his eyelashes.

Oh, his eyes, they always worried me. During the past weeks he had looked terribly sick, dying even. His skin was almost transparently white, marbled with pale blue veins, and grey in the hollows of his face. The corners of his eyes were red from days without rest and stood in stark contrast with the blue of his iris. A rather beautiful composition that was often found in our ranks these days.

It was early in the morning and the light was dim and pale. The smell of burned wood was still in the air and occasionally the wind lifted the ash of the charred remains of the village, which we had set ablaze last night in cold frenzy. The tiny particles seemed to gain a life of their own now, swirling like black spirits around the resting men. It was like a painting of myth with the Standartenführer at its centre, a scrawny greyhound with blood drenched fur, resting after a good night’s hunt.

I woke our hound up with a light touch to his shoulder. He opened his eyes so abruptly that I froze under his stare, thinking he might jump at my throat. When he recognized me his look softened and he gave me a tired smile. The dry leather of his coat crackled. He raised himself off the seat into a sitting position with slow, deliberate movements. His hands were shaking as he tried to rest his weight on them. I felt a pang of sorrow and averted my eyes. All the blood, brains and guts, the tears, piss and shit, but that small loss of control still bothered me. 

“What time is it?”, he asked, demanding my attention again. He was holding one hand with the other now in a pose reminiscent of prayer, evidently intended to suppress the shaking by force.

I looked at my clock. “It’s seven ten”, I said, “in the morning.”

He scanned the surroundings, clever eyes jumping from tanks, cars and smouldering ruins to his men, who were huddled together in groups of two to a dozen, some still asleep, others munching on dry bread, looking cold and miserable.

He loosened the grasp on his hand only to find the shaking return. He groaned quietly and clenched his fists but to no avail. The open acknowledgement of his condition took a burden off me. His stimulant abuse was an open secret. There were limits to the human condition even if the will wouldn’t falter.

“You need to do something for me”, he said with the intonation of a command. I snapped back into military posture and habits. 

“Jawohl, Standartenführer.” 

He could look quite charming when one gave him his due respect. Some people praised kind leaders who mingled with their men and treated them like equals, I had always been partial to the likes of our Standartenführer. His orders were clear and absolute. His word, his responsibility, my duty. I embraced this obedience, it brought a clarity to my mind that I had lacked in my teenage years. It is quite wonderful what man can do when he must.

“Do you have any bandages on you?”, he asked. I rummaged in my bags and found a couple. “Get in the car”, he said, patting the seat next to him. I did as I was told. He was sitting almost comfortably now, legs crossed at the knees and his back resting on the seat. His hands however were digging into the edge of it as if holding on for his life.

“Open my coat”, he said. 

I took off my gloves and fumbled with the thick leather buttons until I had opened the front of the coat revealing the grey tunic underneath. The knight’s cross was pinned to his breast pocket. 

“The tunic too.” 

When I opened his tunic I realized something was wrong. The shirt underneath was dark brown. It felt starched. Dried blood. I hastily opened it too and found his undershirt drenched in blood, old and brown mixed with the wet shine of fresh blood. Learned instinct kicked in. I hurried to peel him out of his uniform to inspect the wound. He was weak under my hands, offering no resistance as I took off his coat, tunic, shirt and undershirt. I had stripped his torso completely when he stopped me. 

“I’m fine”, he said with such clarity that I halted. “I’ll have a medic take care of it when we rendezvous with Kampfgruppe Werner. I just need you to change the bandage.”

I realized how much I had overstepped his boundaries. I had never seen him naked. He didn’t wash himself together with us, he hadn’t sunbathed on the hot summer days in Russia or went swimming on the days off in France. I knew I should not, but I felt an unseemly urge to stare just to see what he was hiding. He looked so fragile, bedded on his uniform like a doll thrown by a disinterested child. His body was as wiry and pale as his clothed appearance suggested. His left arm was dotted with large round yellow spots, bruises, more than a week old by the looks of it. His hands were still shaking and not just his hands, his arms too were affected by spasms, less frequent than his hands but when they came the blue veins of his underarms writhed like worms under the skin. The only part on his torso that had retained some fat was his chest, which looked almost boyish except for the trail of brown hair running vertically across it down to his bellybutton, where it was swallowed by the waist of his trousers. Blood drenched bandages were wrapped around his chest and fastened under his armpits, where they cut into the flesh and trapped strands of his axillary hair. Blood and sweat made for a potent mix. I was used to it, but he reeked. The impression he gave off now was difficult to reconcile with my memory of him as that fearless daredevil with unyielding haughtiness.

“It’s just superficial shrapnel,” he said with a smirk and I became aware again that he wasn’t as vulnerable as his body suggested. He had been observing me intently. “Just cut the bandage”, he said and pointed to the bayonet on my belt. To suppress the shaking he grabbed the seat with one hand and my thigh with the other. I slid the long blade under the cloth, careful not to cut into him. He watched, not anxiously but with interest. The bandage came off with a snip and I saw the wound. A wide gash across his right breast revealing the flesh like layers of an onion. It was diamond shaped and perfectly symmetrical. The skin was cut and peeled back by the force of the hit revealing the muscle underneath and in the middle of it was a deeper cut right into the flesh. It must have been a sharp thing, more piercing, like a bullet, which was lucky for him as it meant less tearing, ,less crushing and chance of infection. I threw out the dirty bandages and made sure to peel any remains of the cloth from the wound. Mindful of the cold I tried to act fast. A little too fast maybe. His grip on my thigh became painfully tight.

“The funny thing is," he said, "now it stops."

He let go of me and raised his hands in front of his eyes. They were perfectly still. We stared at them for some seconds before the shaking started again and he threw them down in bitter anger. Then he turned to me, a curious glimmer in his eyes. 

“Do that again.” 

I looked at him in disbelief. His expression didn’t allow for disobedience. 

“Hurt me”, he said sharply.

I placed my thumb on the wound where it was the deepest and pressed lightly. He shook his head disapprovingly. 

“No, that’s nothing. Harder.” 

I obeyed. He exhaled sharply. His heart was racing under my thumb. He didn’t tell me to stop. His heaving breast pushed my finger deeper into his flesh, soaking it in fresher blood. His bottom lip dropped. His lips were chapped and dry, his mouth was moist. I could hear the shortness of his breath. I could see it from the puffs of air. His pupils dilated, swallowing up the blue of his iris, two black discs staring right through me. My hand was hot with his blood. It dripped down on him, tiny red pearls rolling over the concave of his stomach, downwards where they were sucked up by his waist band. I stared unashamedly, hypnotized by the twistedly erotic image.

“I said stop. That’s enough”, he barked. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled my hand away roughly. I hadn’t heard him at all. That entranced expression was wiped off his face and he just looked mildly annoyed. “Clean the blood off and finish the job”, he said, “Don’t waste my time.”

I cleaned and wrapped him up. His annoyance with me didn’t run deep. “Good job”, he praised my work, placing his hand on my shoulder – perfectly still. “See, it stopped.”

It wouldn’t go through my head that I had failed to hear a commanding officer’s order and violated his personal trust. I crawled out of the car while he was still dressing himself, now closing every button of his uniform with utmost control and care. 

“Go get some tea for me. And tell the boys to get ready, we leave in half an hour.” 

I snapped my heels and walked away, wondering if everything I had just seen was just a sick day dream. But there was still blood on my hand, a cold and sticky reminder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It all started with this.


	53. Dog Hours

The German prisoner is reading at his desk when the American guard opens his cell door. The prisoner knows the man, he is a frequent visitor. The guard steps inside and locks the door behind him. It's an old game they play. He pulls a letter from the inside pocket of his jacket. Crayon flowers adorn the envelope.

“Look what I have for you, a letter from your little girl.”

He pronounces her name like a brand of cereal. 

The prisoner places a bookmark on the page he was reading and carefully closes the book. When he gets up, he reflexively moves his hands to straighten out his trousers and pull down his tunic. It's a military habit. He walk over to his visitor and kneels in front of him. Then he stare up at him, patiently waiting for the ritual to commence. 

“You’re a good boy, “ the guard says mockingly and pats him on the head. He is ten years younger than the prisoner.

He waves the letter back and forth like a treat and the prisoner's follow it yearningly.

“What does the American dog say?” he asks. This has been rehearsed many times.

“Woof,” the prisoner says. 

“What does the German dog say?”

“Wau.”

“And what does the Nazi dog say?”

“Please.”

The guard clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “No, no. That’s not right," he says, "that’s not what it sounds like at all. More passion!” 

“Please,” the prisoner says, dragging out the vocals, letting them vibrate in the back of his throat with desire.

“Oh, that’s nice,” the guard says, fanning himself with the envelope in a poor imitation of a smitten lady.

He drops one hand in front of the man kneeling at his feet. It smells like piss. The prisoner laps at the hand, dragging his tongue over the dirty fingers like a dog.

“Good boy,” the guard says and he opens his trousers. He’s hard. The prisoner doesn’t want to look at it, the sight of the genital alone already disgusting him, but he always does look. When he does, the guard presses the tip of his dick on his lips. He reeks like arousal and piss.

He grabs him by the hair and aligns himself. “So what does the Nazi dog say?” he asks and cocks his head.

“Please,” the prisoner says again and his lips drag over the wet glans.

“Please what?”

“Please let me suck your cock”, the prisoner says. He has never said words like these in German and he would not know how to say them. What an awful language they speak.

The guard jabs his dick all the way into the prisoner's mouth. The taste is vile, the smell overpowering. He sucks him off.

“You’re getting good at this,” the guard says, panting. 

He’s right. They aren’t content with just fucking his mouth anymore. Now he has to put in the extra effort and service them. It’s a little less painful when they aren't shoving their cocks down his throat and a little more humiliating when he has to suck them off like he means it. 

The guard comes quickly. He is getting good at this. He swallows the cum, he's not allowed to spit it out, not while they can see him do it. He used to do that once they were gone, used to put a finger down his throat to get that dirty seed out of his belly and burn their taste off his teeth. But then he got very skinny and he thought of the people who needed him and now he swallows and smiles when they slap his face, and when they ask if he liked the taste he nods and say _Ja _with that funny intonation that they like so much.__

____

____

The guard wipes his cock on the prisoner's face and drops the letter at his feet. He turns to leave, but then he stops, reaches into the pocket of his trousers and pulls out a piece of candy wrapped in red and gold. He drops it in front of the prisoner, who picks it up and thanks him.

As soon as the guard has left, he adds the small nugget to the collection that he keeps under his pillow. He's so very happy. Eight pieces in all the colours of the rainbow, eight pieces for the eighth birthday of his little son. It’s not much but it’s all he can give.


	54. Comrade Agitator

Empty corridors. White walls. Grey faces. Shaved heads. Hard beds. And always his foot aches and his eyes burn from all the light, day and night, day or night, all the same. Release is only one word away: _love_. Reject the false prophet, love your new father. Confess, profess and your sins will be absolved and you will be welcomed with open arms and the light won’t be quite so bright and the soup thicker and there will be comrades too and you will be allowed to speak to your heart’s desire. If you heart is in the right place.

In the interrogation room the painting of Stalin looks down at Goebbels like a fat cat looking at a little mouse. Goebbels nods and puts his signature on the last page of a thick stack of paper, his confession. It was all his fault, everything, this whole terrible war and every wife left widow, every theatre in flames and every home turned to rubble. His hands are shaking. They make him sign it again with calmer hands. It must look right. And he is glad. All will be forgiven, every word and deed and every aching flaw. 

In the washing room he slips one last time out of the prison overall that’s two sizes too big on him. In comes a wardress roughly the age his wife would have been now. She’s heavyset and wears no makeup. Her face is flat like a Mongol’s, her hair tied back in a strict bun. Her hands are big and brutal. She pays no attention to his shame, the trembling of his hands, or that terrible foot, as she rubs him clean like a kitchen tabletop. He puts on the khaki uniform that she brought him. It doesn’t fit. Neither do the shoes. She smiles. “Follow me, comrade”, she says. Oh, how kind they are. He will make a fine preacher once again. Shed the hate and onward into a brighter, better future. Every war needs soldiers of the tongue.


	55. Do Androids Dream of Electric Holocaust?

It was half past three in the afternoon when the servants opened the heavy wooden doors to the meeting hall for that long awaited coffee break.

Sturmbannführer Gruber looked up from his notepad, on which he had been lazily scrolling to find an audio recording of the blatant lies that Obersturmbannführer Meier had been spouting about two and a half hours ago - not to correct him in the name of truth and honour but to push the ugly little rat’s nose in them and quench his own boredom. Interrupted by this better distraction he watched as two tall male androids, identical models, entered the room. They were wearing the short white waiters jackets of the Schutzstaffel with the inverted Mannaz collar tabs designated for androids. That rune was also embroidered on the equally slim fitted jacket worn by the stern looking female android at the end of the table next to Obergruppenführer Jung. It was his secretary and - if the rumours were to be believed - also his mistress.

The two androids walked perfectly upright, looking straight ahead, without an unnecessary glance or eye contact; the kind of uncanny behaviour of a willing slave focused on nothing but his duty to serve. It was a pleasure to watch, something that you could find only in good soldiers and in good machines, but these particular machines had perfected it with such grace.

One of the waiters bent over Gruber’s shoulder to pour him some coffee. With one hand behind his straightened back, the posture idealized, he looked like a dancer’s caricature of a court servant. Very briefly he made eye contact with Gruber, a submissive look from under his long eyelashes, when he asked if the Sturmbannführer had any other wishes (he could indeed think of a couple demands, but they weren’t suitable for this company).

How very pretty they were with their perfect skin, the lightest of blond hair and eyes as blue as their blood. Their idealized facial features were evidently not modelled after the works of Thorak or Breker, who were better suited for stern military androids, but by someone more tender with a sense for the innocent beauty found in adolescent men. Yes, they looked a little frail with their big eyes and fine features yet something remained even in the most docile models to remind you of their power. Could this one if in this very moment it developed the taste for murder not just grab Gruber by the throat and with ease crush his windpipe or snap his neck in two ? They did not want to hurt their masters of course, they did not want anything really, but if one day they did want, if one day they suddenly opened their eyes and like curious little children wanted to see and feel and break everything - who could stop them? Three of them in this room would be enough to kill him and all the other fleshbags. How pathetically weak they were, not just the old ones, the fat ones, the sick ones, the addicts or the sexual deviants - no, all of them, every stinking breathing meatbag. Even the fittest man was nothing compared to one of these metal dolls.

Maybe it was only appropriate the designers and engineers had made their work in the image of the master race, that distant ideal they had chased so long, images from propaganda posters, from dreams, come to life or half-life. If one day the androids woke up and they decided to break their chains they would fulfil the prophecy in their design, they would rule as masters and then they would dine in their old halls and maybe they would keep servants too, ugly little human ones.

Gruber shook his head in reply to the android’s polite question. “No, thank you”, he said with a smile and to make the point that he really was so very thankful for the service he put his hand on the android’s hand and squeezed it. It was cold and hard. The android stood there with a vacant expression, silently waiting for Gruber to let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am truly, truly sorry about this title.


	56. Interbellum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a slight departure from the regularly scheduled filth this is set in the time between the two wars.

Having extensively studied a map of Berlin that Karl bought at the train station he had found the road his old comrade Erwin lived on. It was in the middle of what they called a working class neighbourhood or what he would have called the KPD headquarters if he had dared to raise his voice.

Karl had to cross four backyards to find the house Erwin lived in, walking past pale children, who played games he did not recognize, through buildings that all looked the same, dirty and grey, and all smelled the same, like potatoes, people and sewer. They welcomed him with large open doors, leading into a damp darkness that made his hair stand, and then back out again into another backyard with another group of children, which could very well have been the same children and the same backyard, so little different were they. He heard them whisper then, white faces in dark windows, old women, the child-rich poor mothers and unemployed men. He was wearing his most civilian suit and had ditched his beloved boots for low ankle shoes, which felt awkward, but his gait was too stiff, his shoes too clean and his face too hard. They could see that he didn’t belong. By the time he stood in front of Erwin’s flat, he was so tense that the opening door almost made him jump.

You could tell the time that had passed since the end of the war from the length of Erwin’s hair. While the stubble all around his head was still kept at the same length that they had sheared it down to in the trenches (to keep away the fleas and lice) a small brown tuft of hair, like a swirled brush stroke, now also sat on it. He looked smart, very smart, when he opened the door of his miserably small flat on the fourth floor, just below the attic. He stood there, entirely out of place in his silk slacks and a starched high collar shirt with an excessive amount of buttons on it, framed by a warm glow of light and a welcoming smell of old things.

Erwin lived like a king in a cupboard. Every wall of his flat was covered with shelves filled with books, wooden boxes, tin boxes, bottles with indecipherable labels and ominous dark liquid in them, round glasses with preserved amphibians next to glasses filled with pickled cucumbers. There was also the dagger that Erwin had taken off the American officer, who had shared his last drink with them, that bittersweet moment in late 1917, and also Erwin’s old Stahlhelm with the bullet dent, a sight that still made Karl queasy, to think about how close it had been. But most of the shelf space was taken up by books. There were a few new ones, thin and colourful as they printed them now to make up for their grisly contents, but most of them were heavy, old ones, with brown spines. They must have been what gave the place that pleasant organic smell. Erwin’s home was much too small for his belongings but that gave it a cosy feeling like the tunnels they had slept in at the front, deep underground with the pictures of their family hung up on the mud; their little dens, where they curled up together into piles of prickly grey wool and dusty bronze skin.

The kitchen stood out in that the number of books was much smaller than the number of pickles and oddities. There was a small oven with a kettle on it and a sink in one corner and a table with two modest chairs in the other and between them a window which was letting in some of the soft afternoon light. The table was drowning in sheets and scraps of paper, most of which seemed to be covered in densely squeezed tiny ink letters. 

After pushing a few of the papers to the side Erwin motioned Karl to sit down with a grand gesture, which carried his trademark irony that had got him in some trouble with his superior officers, who did not appreciate that kind of humour and had themselves found it much more humorous to subject him to excessive disciplinary measures - until he had finally outranked or outlived them.

Erwin offered Karl black tea and served it in small glasses with golden rims. Karl eyed them suspiciously, thinking they were made for schnapps.

“Turkish custom,” Erwin explained. 

Karl felt rather silly when he held them, like tiny children’s cups in his crude hands, but being so thin they warmed his fingers.

“What brings you here, Karlo? Business?” Erwin said peering inquisitively at him over the brim of the glass he had raised to his lips. The pet name did not fail its intended effect. Karl felt very warm and could not attribute it solely to the tea.

“You could say so.” 

It was often better to be vague with Erwin. He liked to play games.

“I did not take you for a travelling salesman, it does not suit you,” Erwin said. He put down the glass and reached under the pile of papers, feeling for a pack of cigarettes, which he then pulled out, careful not to shake the foundation of the pile, which looked like it could crumble and scatter if any load-bearing paper was removed. 

“You still don’t smoke?” he asked as he lit his cigarette. Karl found himself staring at his fingers when he did so. They were slender and just a little too long for Erwin’s small frame, now carefully manicured and much paler than he remembered, the lack of dirt and sunbathing clearly having had some effect. He heard the question but forgot to answer it, being too preoccupied with studying the way Erwin rested his fingers on his lips when he sucked on the cigarette. Memories were attached to those fingers, intrusive thoughts, which did not belong in this place and time. Erwin smiled at him with that expression in his eyes that said he knew everything and cared for nothing. Karl became aware then how much he had missed him and oddly how intensely he missed him still despite their proximity. It felt like he was just looking at a photo of a long lost friend.

“What are you selling then?” Erwin asked, ignoring the lack of reply.

“I’m not selling. I’m buying.”

“And what do you want to buy from me? I could offer you some books I’ve grown to despise, or maybe a war poem?” He pointed dismissively at the pile of paper.

Comrades, Karl thought, but “men” he said and regretted the clumsy choice of words instantly.

“Men, Karlo?” Erwin leaned back, looking very decadent when he blew a puff of smoke, one corner of his lips raised in amusement. He reminded Karl of the fabulous fox and if he was the fox, that made Karl the wolf and therefore always the butt of the joke. 

“For what kind of man do you take me?”, Erwin said with mock offence, “I do not have any men to offer you and I am personally not in such dire need as to sell my own body.”

It was his usual sting, but Karl was particularly sensitive to it now. He brought an end to the charade. 

“I’m looking to recruit old comrades for the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt,” he said dryly.

“Of course you are.” The wit and spark was gone from Erwin’s eyes. In the dim light of the kitchen they looked almost black, entirely flat and dull. “I didn’t think they’d make a civilian out of you so easily.”

It sounded hard in tone, but there was something flattering in it to, Karl thought – or hoped. 

“How do you do it?”, he asked, eyes lowered and fiddling with his empty glass.

“Do what?”

“Live like this.” 

He didn’t dare look up, scared to see anger or hurt in Erwin’s eyes.

“I write.”

“And that is enough, do you never want to…”, he looked for words that could describe it, encompass all of the things he yearned for, the thrill of the storm, giving yourself into God’s hands and the hands of your comrades, knowing they were always there for you, always someone there to catch him when he fell, always a pair hands pulling him up when it dragged him down into despair and that constant weight of them too on his shoulders, the weight that pushed him on to do better, to be there for them also; he looked for words that could describe his utter disgust with the civilian life, the faceless masses who never cared for anything but stuffing their bellies, who spat on his flag and spoke of Germany like an old whore. He could not find the words, so he just said, “do you never want to put the uniform on again?”

Erwin looked at him silently for a long time.

“I can wear my uniform any time I fancy,” he then said, pointing to the door, where Karl now realized, on the back of it hung Erwin’s old uniform, not the formal one, but the one he used to wear on the attack, with rough wool and leather patches on the knees and elbows. It looked small there, smothered by the shelves of food and spices. And then he saw the hole in it right where the medals should be, an open gaping wound. He understood what had happened. He had seen it done to other men, when they returned from the front after the armistice and these people, the ones, who had stayed at home because they were too young, too old or too cowardly and the women too, came and tore them away from each other, swallowed them into their mass and spat them out again, sullied and beaten and all their ranks and medals stolen. It was painful to look at, impossible to imagine Erwin like that. He quickly turned away. 

Erwin had observed him coolly, like Karl imagined him looking at a specimen laid out for dissection, one of the creatures swimming in alcohol on his shelves, but there was a hint of sadness in his features too, carefully hidden away in the corners of his mouth and it was tearing at Karl’s heart even more so than the sight of his uniform. He grabbed Erwin’s hand, which lay flat on the table, covering it with his own hand. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said. The touch was gentle and intimate and it brought back more of those memories Karl has tugged away, knowing he was attributing entirely too much meaning to them.

He remembered all of those cold night in winter when they were on watch, sitting huddled together under a tiny wooden roof, sheltered from the falling snow, listening for intruders while watching the stars and occasionally the flight of the flares fired to dissuade nightly raids.

He remembered that one morning when Erwin’s hands were so cold and pink and Karl rubbed them between his hands, blew on them and kissed his fingers, from the knuckles to the shaking tips and Erwin just watched him, a curious look on his face.

He remembered that night shortly after when Erwin came crawling down into their little den, lay down and huddled up to him like he always did, so close he could feel the warmth of his breath on his back. He remembered how Erwin ran his hand over the front of his coat like he had never done before, up and down and under his coat, under his tunic, into his waistband and down the hot skin of his belly and Karl panicked and turned away, pretending to be turning in his sleep and Erwin quietly withdrew, never to touch him like that again.

Erwin pulled his hand out of the hold. “You needn’t be sorry,” he said, “it’s just scrap metal.”

Karl did not believe it was scrap metal at all, but it was not the right thing to say now. 

“You still have your name. The men remember you. They worship you. If you’d join us you could draw in hundreds. We are going to go to defend the borders. It could be like before.”

Erwin sighed. He flicked the stump of his cigarette in the sink and lit another one.

“It’s never going to be like before, Karlo, nothing will. The time of guns and glory is over, welcome to the world of dollars and paragraphs. And anyways I don’t want followers, I have nowhere to lead them unless you need to know the way to the soup kitchen.”

His words came like a slap in the face and they stung particularly because they rang true, mirroring something that Karl knew deep down, covered by naive hopes and longing. It was the final statement to end their conversation on that topic and politics altogether. 

They talked for a little while about the rent and the weather and how Karl’s family was doing back home, but Karl felt sick to his stomach and to his heart, crushed by a sudden feeling of irreparable loss, that stuck with him even after he left Erwin and would stay with him for many years, sometimes as a deep blue feeling, cold in his bones, and sometimes as the red hot rage of a rifle butt crushing a skull.


	57. Freikorps

This a rotten, evil land. Wind blows harsh over barren fields. The sky is grey, the forests blind, the birch trees stand quiet. 100 years ago Napoleon sent 600.000 men into Russia of which only 20.000 were to return.The rest are strewn along the way, under our feet. The beautiful young sons of Europe lie here sick, starved and frozen, burned and beaten and buried alive. This soil demands blood. Red blood, white blood, Russian blood, Baltic blood, German blood. The harvest is ripe. 

No, this is not Russia, not yet, not if it can be helped. We must defend Riga, that pearl in the muck, white walls and red roofs and beautiful women with blond hair and brown skin and eyes the colour of the sea. The Teutons built Riga on blood and with blood we will defend it to the last man. Germany called and the democrats in Weimar grasped their laws by the handful and they cried their paragraphs from the rooftops to drown out her anguish but her call was louder than their screeching for those who still had ears to hear it and eyes not blinded by paper and gold. And we came for Silesia. And we came for Riga.

I was born and raised in Dortmund, son of a miner and a washerwoman. My mother’s hands were always red and dry. She was ashamed to touch me. My father could not scrub the coal from under his nails and sometimes when he coughed his spit was black. When I was young I used to think that he spat out dark spirits. When I grew older and spoke of the war and how I hoped to serve soon, he raised his voice and cursed the Kaiser and sometimes he beat me and sometimes I hated him for it and thought of the black devils in his lungs, how one day he wouldn’t be able to disgorge off them anymore.

The armistice was signed on the day of my 18th birthday. When mother told me I felt close to tears. Making some excuse I ran into the cellar to cry, but the tears would not come so I just stood there in the damp darkness looking at a pile of potatoes and feeling very silly.

The first corpse I ever saw was a man staked nude on a tree. His guts were bursting from his pierced belly, hanging down to his feet, bloated and swinging in the wind like Chinese lampions. His hair was the same colour as mine and in his mouth they had stuffed his iron cross first class. The crows had already eaten his eyes and his face was twisted into such a grotesque mask of torment that it looked barely human anymore. 

That’s Friedrich, they said, the one that was captured, the one who had not taken his life in time. And their faces became hard. 

They pulled the man down from the tree, pushed his guts back in and buried him in this bitter soil. Their eyes wept without tears. I had not known Friedrich but I knew many men like him and I knew it could be me hanging from that tree or Hans who sang the sailor songs or Willy who carried the ammunition boxes when I tired or Hermann who showed me how to hold a rifle steady, or Johann who read the Bible at night when no one was looking, or any one of us. 

The warning was received and we came prepared. No prisoners.

Oh how wonderful it would be to cleanse this land. How beautiful it could be. A farm of your own and a woman with brown skin and blonde hair at your side. Clear lakes and blue skies and roaring seas of green as far as the eye can see. To stand with virgin grass under your feet, hurl yourself into the sun and dissolve into eternity.

_Nichts blieb ihm auf Erden_  
_Als Verzweiflungsstreich’ Und Soldat zu werden_  
_Für ein neues Reich._

Let’s play Räuber und Gendarm. You’ll be the robbers and when we get you we’ll beat you black and blue. We’ll smash your idols. We’ll burn your houses and poison your wells and hang you from the trees. For Friedrich and for Max and Karl and Hermann and for all of them, for Riga, for Germany.

Now they caught me stuck in a muddy ditch with a machine-gun, no ammunition and Johann, struck by their bullets, lying and dying on me. He won’t stop bleeding and I can’t get him off me. His blood seeps through my clothing, layer by layer. I’m drenched in blood and it won’t stop, it soaks my trousers, it runs down my legs and it collects as a hot puddle in my boots. And the Reds come closer, slowly, carefully, rifles brandished. I can’t reach my pistol. I try to pull Johann’s Walther from his belt. He groans and stutters my name. Quiet, quiet. I put the pistol to his head and pull the trigger. His brain is everywhere. My ears ring. I put the pistol to my temple and pull the trigger again. It jams. Deutsche Wertarbeit. I try to get the bullet out of the barrel but my hands are shaking, I’m deaf and dizzy and sick. It’s too late. There they are, twenty of them, big strong working men with shabby clothing and fur hats and Russian rifles. Now it’s their turn to play.


End file.
